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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

For a game that on the Xbox received almost unanimous praise, Gearbox's PC port seems to inspire reactions ranging from ambivalence to adulation, with some deeply divided opinions in between. In some cases, those opinions are divided even within the same review.

Randy "Duval Magic" Pitchford of Gearbox Software chatted on the CPL IRC channel with a bunch of Halo fans to answer their questions; a complete transcript of the chat is up at HaloMods and The Junkyard.

In summary, I'd say the important points were:

HateKill rated Halo "worth buying", as opposed to Worth Playing. While they liked the AI and the "classic gameplay", they decided to "leave out the storyline and get onto the important stuff" in their review, which didn't bode well for the game from the start.

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.

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.