Jake 'Evergreen98' Billo has posted a three part article at The Junkyard, comparing elements of the forthcoming PC release of Halo by Gearbox to the original game on the Xbox.

In an interview over at Telefragged, Randy Pitchford from Gearbox gives us some hope that even if Halo for the PC doesn't have cooperative play at launch, it might gain it later on:

Randy Pitchford: Co-op for the Xbox wasnТt networked -- it was two view ports into one game. We can easily support cooperative play via split screen, but thatТs kind of a cop out. We want to do it right. ItТs important to us and weТre working on it, but we havenТt been able to promise that itТs going to be there at launch.

Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for the heads-up.

If the article at UGO is to be believed, there are a few more pieces of information available about PC Halo.

What's in:

What's out:

Some of these, such as the lack of cooperative play, had merely been speculated about before, but if the article is accurate, cooperative play in PC Halo is now definitely out.

Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO who pointed out the article.

Words can not describe how cool the guys at PlayMyth.net are! They have updated Myth 2 AGAIN! Check out all the new information at their site.

Louis Wu at HBO has posted that IGN has 8 different videos of Halo on the PC available for free download. There also seem to be nine new screenshots, also available on the same page. Kudos to Bullseye for the original heads-up to HBO.

Sioflake has posted that there are now 21 teams registered for the Myth World Cup 2003. If one more team doesn't register to make up a field of 24, then teams 21, 22 and 23 will have to forego competition in order that a bracket for 20 teams can be made. The site has instructions on how to register a team, the tournament rules, as well as plenty of other information.

Earlier this year, unnoticed by us here at Rampancy (fancy that) the long-standing disputes over the ownership of the source code for the popular Hotline chat and pira.... err, file-sharing client and server seem to have come to an interesting conclusion, with the open-sourcing of the code for Hotline 1.x and the publication of the protocol specifications. The new project has been renamed OpenSprings. Apparently the code is available either under GPL or a commercial license. The commercial version of the app is still being maintained by HotSprings, Inc., which apparently now owns the code.

Personally, we at Rampancy are still using the very excellent FrogBlast clone for OS X, having abandoned the official Hotline application after it was no longer possible to close or hide the ad-banner-bearing toolbar. However, if you're game to give it a try, you can download the newest version, 1.9, of the official client and server from the Hotsprings, Inc. download page. Versions are available for OS X, Mac OS Classic , and Windows.

Incidentally, Rampancy still operates its own Hotline...err, HXD server, at hotline://rampancy.net.

Earlier this month there was a new release of the SDL version of the Marathon 1 scenario for Aleph One, commonly referred to as M1A1. You can see the news posted by Tophet at Orbital Arm, and the files themselves are available from the Aleph One downloads page, from Fileball, and Bungie.org.

The co-founder of the company that is currently porting Halo to the Mac, Westlake Interactive, one of the longest running and best-known Mac porting houses, is leaving the company to work at Aspyr Media, according to a story at InsideMacGames.

Ryan Mhaddy Matthews wrote in today to let us know that the Junkyard gaming site is holding a contest where people can guess the release date of Halo for the PC and the Mac, with prizes to be announced later.

Coexist wrote into the HBO forum to let everybody know that Gamespy has put up their preview of Halo for the PC online, including a rundown of the multiplayer capabilities. Apparently the game will ship with full Internet multiplayer as well as six new multiplayer maps, some of which will feature pilotable Banshees and Rocket Warthogs. In addition, there are several other improvements-- from faster load and save times to higher resolutions than the Xbox version's 640x480. Editing tools are also planned.

The downside? Well, it seems as if cooperative play might not be supported. I, for one, am hoping that part turns out not to be true-- cooperative is my favorite way to play Halo.

The story also cites that Halo unit sales have passed 3 million units.

Marius has released a executable version of the Myth metaserver. For more information click here. It is Windows only

Thanks Marius!

From Michael Bagnall of Powertools Productions comes some good news about work on Myth 3: A 1.1 patch.

MythDevelopers are pleased to announce the release the long anticipated release of the 1.1 update for Myth III: The Wolf Age.

MythDevelopers is an all-volunteer organization of programmers, developers and players who were granted the opportunity to fix the Myth III game using source code provided by the publisher and developer. MythDeveloper members have been working on this particular release for almost 11 months and have produced a significant update to one of the industry's best Real-Time Strategy Engines.

The crown jewel of this update is the migration of the multiplayer system from GameSpy to the traditional bungie.net style of multiplayer found on PlayMyth.net. You can now play Myth III on the PlayMyth.net game server and be a part of both ranked, unranked and tournament play in the tradition of Myth 2: Soulblighter and Myth: The Fallen Lords. Free PlayMyth.net accounts can be obtained through the PlayMyth.net web site.

In addition, this patch fixes over 40 game play and stability issues for both Macintosh and Windows based personal computers as well as bringing the bonus maps Pepper Heights and Tides Of Rhi'anon into the general release. Additional variations of the existing maps are also included with enhanced unit sets. Also added are the multiplayer game types Assassins, Stampede, and Balls On Parade which had been previously omitted. This patch also introduces the Fetch and Journeyman units into the Myth 3 World.

A demo is also available my visiting either the PlayMyth.net or MythDev.com web sites. The demo allows for unranked play on a demo server with five variations of two multiplayer maps. Also included are a tutorial and two levels from the 25 level solo campaign.

At the time of this writing I wasn't able to download the Mac version of the new Myth 3 demo, but the Windows version was there.

On May 15, 2003, Project Magma will be releasing the first major update to Myth II in several years when they present version 1.4. Among its features are:

... over 100 enhancements, bug fixes and new features to Myth II: Soulblighter, in the areas of: graphics; interface improvements; elimination of plugin lag; elimination of chat lag; elimination of the 'walking bug', new mapmaking features; AI improvements and bug fixes; optional vTFL (virtual TFL) gameplay, which effectively brings both games and communities to the same program; and much, much more.

The update will be released approximately two months from today, which also happens to be the day that the team released version 1.3.2. 1.3.2 fixes numerous performance issues with WindowsXP and also brings OS X compatibility to Myth II.

Much more information can be gathered about version 1.4 from the Project Magma site (particularly the downloads section). Everything sounds extremely promising (TFL gameplay in Myth II!), and we can't wait for the final release.

PlayMyth.net is releasing an update for Myth 3 and Myth 2. Go a head and download your copy! I was just testing out Myth 2 for OSX and it runs great, this is really great news for the Myth community! PlayMyth.net has a list of mirrors for Myth 3, and currently you can only download the copy of Myth 2 at their hotline server located at hotline.mythdev.com. Later there will be a mirror for Myth 2.

The updates expires on March 16th!