An extremely long and thorough Tweak Guide for PC Halo has gone up at TweakTown.

SketchFactor posted at Bungie.net about a note sent to him by Destineer. They claim they've had a breakthrough in performance, netting about a week's worth of improvements in a major late-night session. Beta 4, with network play, is supposedly coming soon.

The second batch of Halo figurines, including Green and Red Master Chiefs, an Elite (with Needler and Plasma Rifle) and the Ghost, has now shipped. The collection also includes the Jackal, which we noted on the Bungiecam earlier. Thanks SketchFactor.

Bungie.net has posted the winners of the Halo-Ween contest, where fans were asked to carve a Halo-themed pumpkin. Oddly enough, the 1st place winner was not a 343 Guilty Spark, as a lot of us thought, but a rendition of the Halo 2 EGM Cover. The full list of winners is posted at Bungie.net. Thanks SketchFactor.

...on November 6th at 6 p.m. UTC. There have only been 5 winners so far, which means a lot of prizes are going to go unclaimed. Thanks SketchFactor and Louis Wu.

Tycho at Halo Ops (not to be confused with Tycho at Penny Arcade, or Rhymes With Psycho from Marathon) writes that he took information from an Atari Forums thread about tweaking PC Halo and made an article out of it. It looks eerily similar to the PC Tweak Guide we've seen elsewhere...

Penny Arcade is a popular webcomic that once gave Xbox Halo a mock "Game Of The Year" award accompanied by an image of a toilet to express their feelings about Halo's repetetive level design (what, did they play nothing except The Library?) and then came around later, after having played multiplayer and seen the Halo 2 announcement trailer (they're such scrubs).

For a game that on the Xbox received almost unanimous praise, Gearbox's PC port seems to inspire reactions ranging from ambivalence to adulation, with some deeply divided opinions in between. In some cases, those opinions are divided even within the same review.

Randy "Duval Magic" Pitchford of Gearbox Software chatted on the CPL IRC channel with a bunch of Halo fans to answer their questions; a complete transcript of the chat is up at HaloMods and The Junkyard.

In summary, I'd say the important points were:

HateKill rated Halo "worth buying", as opposed to Worth Playing. While they liked the AI and the "classic gameplay", they decided to "leave out the storyline and get onto the important stuff" in their review, which didn't bode well for the game from the start.

This item at Slashdot points to coverage of the awards at the 2003 Machinima Film Festival, where Red vs. Blue cleaned up.