SourceGuy over at HaloMods has put up a short review of the BansheeWars mod by IronForge. The mod is currently running on HaloMods' own server.

Lorraine "mehve" McLees has put up Part Two of her report from the Anime Reactor convention over at Bungie.net.

Blood Gulch Chronicles, the popular webseries by the group Red vs Blue, using the Halo engine running on the Xbox and set in the Blood Gulch multiplayer map, has taken three prizes at the Machinima Awards 2003: Best Independent Machinima Film, Best Writing, and Best Picture. Congratulations to the Red vs. Blue gang, and thanks to jayWHY and Louis Wu at HBO.

Louis Wu notes at HBO that their own PC Halo dedicated server is experiencing some downtime, and Subnova has put up a server as a substitute.

Mat "MSN" Noguchi, tools programmer at Bungie, posted a blog entry on performance issues in PC Halo. That, and the comments following, are definitely worth reading, along with this forum thread at HBO that prompted him to write the blog.

UPDATE: There's a second part to this piece up now.

There's another review of PC Halo up at WorthPlaying. This one gives the game an 8/10 overall, appreciating the deep storyline and the impressive AI, even if they admit the graphics are "not as impressive" as they were two years ago. People are so jaded, sheesh. Thanks Blue's News.

Well, after five unsuccessful attempts, the September giveaway at Forerunners.org has a winner. Donald Dalton of Oklahoma gets a nice collection of Bungie and Halo swag including action figures, a strategy guide, and copies of Oni and PC Halo. Congrats Donald!

The man who must be, by now, the single most-interviewed human on the Internet, Randy Pitchford, is at it again, this time dishing to Tycho from the newly-opened Halo Ops site. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

Pitchford deflects questions about the possibility of Halo 2 for the PC, but does still hold out a slim hope for cooperative play in PC Halo. However, the interview was conducted back during Fanstock, so perhaps the situation is different now.

[image:6441 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Pressed up against the lens of the Bungie Webcam today is what looks like a Halo action figure box. But instead of the Master Chief, Cortana, or an Elite (the only figures I've seen before) this one looks vaguely like a Jackal.

According to SourceGuy and Grenadiac at HaloMods, the newest version of SparkEdit is out, and supports PC Halo maps and loading multiple BSP sections of campaign maps.

dolbex writes that CarnageReport is running a clan website contest. 1st place is $30 gift certificate to the Bungie Store! Submissions need to be in by November 10; winners will be announced on November 15.

Mr. Smiley writes that Halo Babies has a new comic up; go check it out.

MSNBC has a story on machinima that touches on Red vs Blue. They also mention Lenny and Larry Lumberjack, who apparently have a new film out. Always wondered what had happened to them.

The article also mentions that Half-Life 2 is supposed to have "special tools" specially designed for making machinima.

Personally, while the Halo engine is extremely pretty, and, once you've wormed your way into its guts, pretty extensible, it's not very machinima-friendly. The earliest examples I remember seeing were Quake 1 timedemos, and as a result, were extremely fast downloads compared to rendered QuickTime or Windows Media videos.

Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

Four new Halo reviews today listed at Blue's News: Armchair Empire, PC Gameworld, Gamehelper Newswire, and VideogamesLife. Ratings ranged from 7 out of 10 from Gamehelper to 94 out of 100 from VideogamesLife. All were relatively positive aside from the usual gripes: no coop, and system requirements to play on the highest settings are... well, high.

Given that the Xbox was the state of the art in graphics just two years ago, and only played Halo at 640x480, I'm having a difficult time understanding why everybody thinks they can play Halo at 1600 x 1200 with all the bells and whistles on with anything other than a completely top-of-the-line system including a video card bought yesterday for a month's rent and using beta drivers. Come on, are you guys nuts?

Nvidia has put out a new, non-beta, version of drivers for some of their GeForce cards called ForceWare. Sounds like a Windows product.