Our very own Ferrex, now of Bungie Studios, has posted a message in the forum at HBO giving his own personal views of the pros and cons of the Xbox compared to PCs or Nintendo's GameCube. Some of the highlights:

PC games are beginning to really struggle, in terms of finances and quality. The market is ruthless... developers have less time and more complex games to make, and even more hardware configurations to support. I can't call to mind any trends which suggest things will get any better--even the market for PCs is cooling off.

Against the GameCube, the advantages are even clearer to Rex-- the $100 is more than fair for better hardware, more launch titles, better developer support, etc.

According to Blambi's post at MythVillage, Mike Donges of Mumbo Jumbo has said that the Mac version of Myth III that ships will include many of the bug fixes they are working on a patch for right now.

The German magazine GameStar has posted a Halo review that's drawn some fire from fans over in the HBO forum. For one, apparently it's a little more critical than most of the others we've seen in the English language press of late; it accuses Halo of being unoriginal of all things, then gives away just about all of the plot.

Beyond that, however, Uriel pointed out that they quoted one Boris Schneider-Johne somehow connected to MS' Xbox operations in Germany as laying out a general schedule for the PC conversion of Halo, giving a release date of fall 2002 .

Matt Soell replied that even Jason Jones doesn't really know yet how that's going to be done, and so it's unlikely this guy does, either, whoever he is.

While Butcher has advised me that this is old news, I'm posting it in blatant defiance of his better judgement. Inside Mac Games has posted an item on Microsoft's DirectPlay, and Apple's answer to it:

A couple of years ago, Bungie developed a cross-platform game networking API called Uber ...

[whack]

Apple has picked up Uber and is now developing it as OpenPlay, a network abstraction layer for both the Mac OS and Windows that game developers can use in their games to make them network across both major operating system platforms. Since the technology is available under Apple's Open Source license, developers do not have to pay a licensing fee to use OpenPlay, and they can also modify the source code to meet their needs.

Good to hear that Uber, the networking model I believe the Myth series was built on, is still under development. And even better to hear that Apple is positioning it against DirectPlay, which (in my uneducated opinion) reeks of an attempt to block out other platforms. An interested read, definitely worth stopping by.

Completely non-Blam related, Biodegrader is a Deathmatch fixer plugin currently under development and testing by Badlands, as well as a brave few others. Due to the lack of a major HL distribution center, I've posted a copy of it here, so anyone willing to try it out and file bug reports is welcome to grab it and give it a whirl.

It works just like Clumpfix, in that the host just needs to activate it, and the players just need to have it. When active, it will gradually cause projectiles to expire, preventing the map from overflowing (the principle bug with Deathmatch). It's subtle, but it works great... so far.