Several IMG reader reviews, as well as the IMG review itself, have listed as a con that FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing) is broken in Mac Halo. However, a quick turn around the forums at Gearbox that ported Halo from the Xbox to the PC will turn up the fact that Halo does not support FSAA. The Halo PC Performance FAQ at HBO covers this under point 1.3.1. The IMG review claims that MacSoft said this was due to a "bug in ATI's drivers", however, Halo on the PC doesn't support FSAA on Nvidia cards, either, so I doubt this is caused by a bug in ATI's drivers. And I don't see how Mac Halo would support FSAA if PC Halo doesn't, unless something about DX9 compared to OpenGL is responsible. So while the lack of FSAA support might still be considered a strike against the game for those who are used to it, this isn't a bug in the game or in anybody's drivers-- it's just not there, and turning it on will reduce your framerate.

According to SketchFactor, there's another edition of Ask The Cananimators up at Bungie.net; I think this is the third installment. It's about bacon again. And hockey. Well, what do you expect, they're Canadian.An interesting note in this is that both the Cananimators use Maya to make their animations. The animation package used to make mods was a sticking point for many Mac users, because Gearbox said that to import models into the Halo editing tools, you'd need to use 3D Studio Max or its free younger sibling, gMax. Both packages run only on the PC. Maya, of course, runs on the Mac OS. So Bungie animators, developing for the Xbox, are using a program that can run on the Mac... while Gearbox's porting team developed a version of the editing tools that apparently can't work with Maya because there's no filter. Hmm.

SketchFactor has posted at Bungie.net that in response to some "issues", the Halo PC 1.03 patch is itself... going to be patched. The patch will cause users to lose saved checkpoints within levels.

SketchFactor sauntered into the HBO forum and laid down links to three high res screenshots suitable for wallpaper-making. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

A site called IceTeks (Technology Made Cool, for those who aren't advanced students of sloganology) has reviewed PC Halo and concluded it to be one heck of an awesome game. Put the accolades on the pile over there, boys, and the bar is around the corner. Welcome to the party. Thanks Blue's News.

SketchFactor at Halo: Truth and Reconciliation has posted that the version 1.03 updates to the dedicated server and to the PC Halo client have now been made. Interested parties are urged to read the PC Halo 1.03 release notes before they download the update; likewise, if you're running a dedicated server, you should peruse the 1.03 server readme before getting the patch file, which requires that you already have version 1.02 of the dedicated server.Technically, the game should update itself automatically, but you can do it manually if you prefer.Changes abound in this version, major and minor. Perhaps the most anticipated are the anti-teamkilling features, but welcome are the lengthening of chat and player name strings, as well as ping and assist displays on the scoreboard and "persistent" teams across map cycling.

An Anonymous User popped into our forum to remind everybody that the iGames Regionals for Halo for Windows are coming up on December 7. (Hey, register for an account so we can thank you properly.) Full details in the forum post.

Marc "Cysco" Tardif of Gearbox has posted a detailed description of changes in the forthcoming 1.03 patch for PC Halo, due out on Monday December 8. Included will be anti-teamkilling features, such as increasing respawn times for teamkillers, removed respawn penalty for teamkiller victims, persistent teams, and network play enhancements. No word about some of the more advanced Tribes-style votekicking mechanisms. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

David "Alpha Male" Mertz, lead designer for PC Halo at Gearbox Software, resigned on Dec 1 after completing the Halo Editing Kit tutorial. No news on how this impacts the release of the Editing Kit. Thanks Louis Wu.

Gholsbane tipped us off at RHL that Michael "Blades" Bagnall of MythDevelopers will appear on The Gamesome Mac, a show on MacRadio.com. It will be broadcast tonight, between 9 and 11 PM Eastern, and will be available on-demand after that.

Listening requires QuickTime 5 or better and a minimum 28.8 Kbps Internet connection.Further details can be found at MythDev.

SketchFactor writes on Bungie.net that the .NET conversion has been delayed at least until Monday. You can amuse yourself in the interim by reading the Bungie.NET FAQ.

Of course, when Microsoft bought Bungie, there were plenty of accusations flying around that MS wanted the Mac port killed, or the PC port delayed to avoid cutting into Xbox sales, and various other things, most of which made no sense. However, despite the usual sense of humor that permeates Bungie's communications with its fans, this remark strikes me as unintentionally funny, in answer to the question "I heard that there were lots of security holes and problems with .NET Passport...":

The .NET Passport is used by some of the top businesses and websites all across the world. The technology is proven and security is foremost in the mind of Microsoft and its engineers. For more info, please visit the .NET Passport Q&A mentioned at the top of this page.

The more conspiracy-minded among Bungie's fans will surely believe that .NET was not necessarily chosen solely for its technical merits, but because it's a Microsoft technology. After all, previous iterations of Bungie's community presences-- all very impressive-- got along quite nicely without .NET; the free software conspiracists will no doubt view this as an opportunity to replace internal use of Open Source Software, in this case the programming language Perl, widely used on Linux, BSD and Unix platforms, with a proprietary Microsoft framework.

Of course, if the system works, and works well, it's likely no one will mind such a transition-- after all, it's all about the games, not the websites.

ReviewGamer gave PC Halo an 8.96 out of 10 score overall; the review is almost completely positive, in comparison to most recent reviews. Thanks Blue's News.

An extremely long and thorough Tweak Guide for PC Halo has gone up at TweakTown. The site also has several tweak guides for the Windows operating system itself (mostly XP), and suggests you visit those first. Thanks HBO.

Tycho at Halo Ops (not to be confused with Tycho at Penny Arcade, or Rhymes With Psycho from Marathon) writes that he took information from an Atari Forums thread about tweaking PC Halo and made an article out of it. It looks eerily similar to the PC Tweak Guide we've seen elsewhere...

Penny Arcade is a popular webcomic that once gave Xbox Halo a mock "Game Of The Year" award accompanied by an image of a toilet to express their feelings about Halo's repetetive level design (what, did they play nothing except The Library?) and then came around later, after having played multiplayer and seen the Halo 2 announcement trailer (they're such scrubs). Tycho today mentions that he plays a bit of PC Halo online, when he isn't playing Crimson Skies:

By my lonesome, I sometimes jump on to the Halo demo and try to figure out whether or not I like it. I don't have the performance issues that I often read about, at least not graphically, but the networking on that game is really, really variable. You can play on a server that makes you wonder what they were thinking even putting it out one minute and then get on something smooth that reminds you of late-night Xbox LANs on Blood Gulch. The ping doesn't seem to indicate shit. It would be like if the server browser had a column for "Mint" and then some servers had it and some servers didn't. Ping is like that in Halo PC. I have no idea what it is supposed to represent, and even if I did know I wouldn't know how to detect the presence of that quality in a first person shooter. It might be best to focus your time on dedicated servers, as you would in Battlefield, but there's never been a slot open on one of those since the demo was released.

Somebody give him the password to one of the HBO servers or something.