Rampancy

... in case some old sk00l r4nkh00r decides to knock them out after reading this latest column in Narc's Retorts. The gist is, the future for the Halo community might have more to do with statistics than mods.

Sheesh, we step away from the keyboard from a little while, and the world doesn't have the sense to stop? What are things coming to? Anyway, here's some of what's been going on lately around the Halo news world:

The Gamesome Mac at MacRadio did a streaming QuickTime interview with Peter "Sidestep Pete" Tamte of Destineer (formerly of both Apple and Bungie) and Marty O'Donnell of Bungie (formerly of Total Audio) on December 15. That edition is still playing at their site. Also of interest to Bungie fans would be their Nov 24 2003 show featuring Michael "Blades" Bagnall of MythDevelopers, and the November 4, 2002 show featuring Matt Soell. Word is, Mac Halo is the best-selling game published by MacSoft in the last 4 years, and all that was within a day; MacSoft sent a release to that effect to HBO.

Major League Gaming will hold a tournament in Philadelphia on February 21-22, 2004, and it will feature Halo. Thanks HBO.

The Grunt Plushy Petition hit 1500 signatures. Go grunts [HBO]. Update: Over 1800 on as of today.

Westlake is working on a 1.03 patch for Mac Halo so Macs can play on 1.03 servers. Thanks again HBO.

Rams at Battleground: Halo did two more columns, one was a review of Eric Nylund's latest Halo novel, Halo: First Strike.

You can buy a Halo 2 shirt from the Bungie Store. Why wouldn't you?

A bunch of people-- Billy Oliva, Ben Roth, AfroRyan-- wrote into HBO about a weird glitch they found in PC Halo, on the Truth and Reconciliation level. Warning: do not stack Covenant more than THIS high.

Some people said that Mac OS X version 10.3.2 update improved Halo performance, one of them being Inky (thanks HBO).

Some guys at a site called Webshift are making Master Chief armor a reality. Where were you guys before Halo-ween when my girlfriend wanted to go trick-or-treating as Cortana and I had to nix the idea because there was no good companion costume? Gah. Well, next year.

Linkin Park visited Bungie. Hopefully you don't care.

IGN Insiders can see the first part of a comparison between Halo and Halo 2. We can't because we aren't; we have to save at least some loose cash for stuff like beer.

Want to do Networking Software Development for Bungie? So do we. Sadly, English majors need not apply.

Halo Babies is (are?) back! Thanks Matt Dunn.

Machinima.com has interviewed Geoff "gfunk" Fink and Gus "guS" Sorola of Rooster Teeth Productions, the group that brings you Red vs Blue.

Rams at BG:H thinks there have been a number of blunders in the handling of PC Halo, not the least of which is DirectX 9. He links to a post at the Gearbox forums by Randy "DuvalMagic" Pitchford of Gearbox, in which he talks about a number of interesting technical details, not the least of which is that the way Halo vehicles function virtually require an authoritative server architecture markedly unlike those used by games like CounterStrike.

Thanks Louis Wu at HBO, for providing many of the news items above and encouraging us to wash the beer suds out of our hair, get out from under the Christmas tree, and post some of it.

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.

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.