Louis Wu at HBO passed on word from RavenEA that this week's MacGamer Giveaway features five copies of Mac Halo; the subject of the contest is creation of an image of the Master Chief on vacation. The five funniest win.

Blackstar at Blackstar Productions has received word that he's gotten approval to host another Halo LANfest at the Collins Center in Andover, MA-- the location of last summer's Are You Big Enough LANfest that featured a forty-foot projector screen (as well as several smaller projection areas).This next LANfest will be held next summer. I attended the last one, and can vouch that it was a lot of fun, I'm sure this one will be, too.

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.

News of the Mac Halo Gold Master spread everywhere over the past few days; it seems the disc went to duplication on the 5th and is expected to hit store shelves on or near the projected target date of December 11; news broke at HBO, Subnova, Bungie.net,

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.

Okay, this is official this time, not a few backroom stockboys itchin' to put the new stuff out front before they're supposed to-- Eric Nylund's new Halo novelization, Halo: First Strike, has been released.

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.

gfunk writes on the Red vs Blue website that the Season 1 DVDs are now ready and on sale; the celebratory photo, complete with champagne, DVD case, and Red Army shirt, is a neat touch. Hey, where are the "gold master" photos?

Louis Wu at HBO, with help from Ross Mills, notes that a new edition of the Halo soundtrack is available from Sumthing Else Music Works; this one comes with a DVD-ROM full of trailers and other bonus material. It's not clear yet if this is actually available for purchase yet.

Under the headline "The Circle Is Complete", MacSoft has put up a page on Halo for the Mac, which will be released on December 11. In addition to the official release date, as well as information on the new maps and weapons (same as in PC Halo), the page has the Minimum and Recommended system requirements:

Andrew from Team XBO wrote to let us know that FTC9 is finally released and available for download for by members; all others get BitTorrent.