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.

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.

As of this moment, trying to load the Mill's url, http://fileball.net/mill/ just redirects you to Fileball's front page. Looks like it's gone, perhaps for good this time.

The Lh'owon Ar'kives, containing files for players of Bungie's earlier shooter, Marathon, also hosted at Fileball, is still there.

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.

On top of all the peace pipe smoking that seems to be going on around the Myth community fire tonight, Blades at MythDev has posted that new versions of the Myth clients are available (Mac - Windows), making the game compatible with Mac OS 10.3 (Panther).

Four new Halo reviews today listed at Blue's News: Armchair Empire, PC Gameworld, Gamehelper Newswire, and VideogamesLife.

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

Paul Ryan, an editor at AceGamez, wrote to let us know they've reviewed PC Halo. They've also got a review of Halo for the Xbox there, for comparison's sake, if you're into that sort of thing.

They gave the PC version scores of 8, 9, 10 and 8 in the categories of gameplay, graphics, sound and lifespan, with a rating of 8/10 overall. The Xbox version received a perfect 10.

HaloMods let us know they've opened a Halo server at 204.251.80.250. Currently it's running the Banshee Wars mod we wrote about earlier.

In addition, version 2.0 of the Halo map editor, SparkEdit, has now gone into testing, with support for PC Halo maps as well as other improvements. Thanks Grenadiac.

Two more PC Halo reviews today from Blue's News: LoadedInc and DeadAlfs. DeadAlfs (DeadAlves?) bemoaned the lack of co-op support (and invoked the all-to-common by now comparison to Serious Sam), giving the game an 8 out of 10 overall score.

Doobie at Marius.net writes that due to some server issues, they've had to change IP addresses. Because of that, the EEL file for Myth 2 that you need in your Myth II folder for Marius.net connectivity to work under version 1.4.x no longer works, because the old IP address is hard-coded into it.

OK, normally we don't go around willy-nilly pointing at people's petitions. But this one is politely worded, and is a reasonable, and I would imagine not too onerous, feature to request. Gary Williams has put up a request to add a logging feature to the Halo Dedicated Server and the PC Halo client, to aid in creating statistical analyses for player ratings and ladders, as well as other things. If you think it's worthwhile, why not take a look.

SketchFactor writes at Bungie.net that they're holding a Halo-Ween pumpkin carving contest; carve up a Halo-themed pumpkin, take a photo of it, and email it to feedback@bungie.com before October 31, 2003. All standard image types are acceptable (JPEG, BMP, TIF, GIF). If you want to snail mail a photo, use this address: