[image:6275 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Bungie.net's Truth and Reconciliation site added seven new screenshots this week, all culled from those sent in by beta testers. We've added them to our screenshot gallery for PC Halo. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

Grenadiac has posted at HaloMods.com that the newest edition of SparkEdit, 1.1, is now available at HaloMods.com, along with a movie demonstrating object placement.

With only 3 of 28 prizes claimed so far, Louis Wu at HBO is admitting that it may be harder than anticipated... but it is still possible. Keep looking!

...but not quite yet. So far, Red vs Blue has only been nominated by the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences in six categories: Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Virtual Performance, Best Writing, Best Editing, and Best Independent Film. Thanks Louis.

[image:4306 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]In an HBO Forum thread, David "Evil Otto" Candland gave some info from his personal experience with the version of Halo for the Mac, currently in beta testing.

Grenadiac and SourceGuy mentioned in the HBO forum that the next version of their Halo editor, SparkEdit, should be out soon, featuring source and destination editing for teleporters, weapon and powerup spawn point editing, rally waypoint editing, and many other new features.

Another review that went by the boards by us this past few days was FiringSquad's review of Halo, which is harsh. They call Halo's graphics "dated" and "blocky", and repeatedly say that such-and-such shortcoming is "a huge mistake" or "inexcusable" or "defies logic". However, let it not be said that we rant whenever anyone criticizes our favorite game; a lot of this review's points are spot-on, and raise questions that are more than fair to ask.

A quick rundown on the pro and con side:

PRO

• AI. "AI is the best in the business."
• Sound. "The music is as moody and powerful as it ever was."
• Campaign. "The singleplayer game is, for all intents and purposes, the best pure action on the PC since Half-Life, and maybe ever." (Ed. note: Sheesh, guys... play Marathon sometime.)

CON

• Weapon balance. "The sniper rifle is abusive. It dominates outdoor matches."
• No co-op. "Gearbox may not have had the full two years to put it in, but Microsoft and Bungie did. It's their fault that it didn’t make it into the game and quite frankly, it’s a huge mistake."
• Multiplayer. No boot/ban facilities; text-only chat in same window as console messages.
• Graphics. Blocky.

Of course, worst of all may be the backhanded compliments:

The abundant use of voices and voice effects is still above and beyond most any other recent game has done. From the friendly, reassuring voice of Cortana, through the chatter of marines ("hey, you stole my kill!") and the surprised yells of grunts, to the frustrated rage of elites - this is the kind of detail and character you'd expect only from a Blizzard game.

Ouch!

The remarks about graphics and co-op especially are worth attention. We've all read articles about how Halo is a "complicated beast", requiring more programmer-hours than other projects to port. I'm sure nobody believes that PC Halo took so long because everybody was on vacation.

However, nearly all these articles give us to believe that what's complicated about Halo-- and difficult to port-- are the rendering routines. When users complain about low framerates even on new machines with decent video cards, they're often told this is just a consequence of just how much work the Halo engine has to do, and the system resources required to do it.

So how then can PC Halo's graphics be blocky and unimpressive compared to other games? Basically, how can the game's engine be so complex that it causes problems for machines that are able to run games with graphics that reviewers apparently believe offer superior graphics to Halo?

Perhaps it's too technical question for there to be a simple answer, but it seems there is a basic contradiction here somewhere.

As for coop.. well, I agree with FiringSquad. The market is hungry for cooperative network play. Playing coop is the most fun I have playing Halo, and also the most fun I had playing Myth, Marathon, and Unreal.

Let's hope there's a patch. Thanks Louis Wu.

Last Wednesday we noted Matt Slagle's review of Halo for the PC platform, which contained a number of not-so-nice things about the game we all know and love, as well as some minor inaccuracies that cast doubt on the amount of due diligence applied by Mr. Slagle in writing the review. Shishka emailed him, as well as many others, and received a reply that the article would be corrected.

Aquaduct, the Xbox tunneling app for Mac OS X that lets people play Xbox Halo on the Internet using their Macs, turned one year old awhile ago (August 30, to be exact), but it seems that we all-- including the program's creator, PfhorSlayer, missed it. Word has it he's hard at work on something new for the program's next version, but we've all been warned not to bug him about it; however, there's always the Aquaduct forum.

We just closed our last poll, about the forum format. You can see the results of that (or any other old poll) on the polls page. With 150 votes, the UBB-style forum beat out the WebBBS style forum. However, the result is hardly a landslide, and for most of the poll's life the two formats were neck and neck. This means we are still going to dig back into R.net's code and try to fix up the forum with more WebBBS-like features, some of which were in the last iteration of R.net but were lost in the last upgrade. Drupal is about to update to 4.3, so hopefully whent that codebase freezes, we'll install it and then get to work on the forum.

The new poll up is about PC Halo; whether you will buy it, have bought it, or won't buy. All we ask is that if you're planning on buying it, but haven't yet, and don't have moral objections to Amazon, that you click through to our new shop page and see if you can order Halo there. (Pre-orders for Mac Halo and Halo 2 are also on that page, as well as specialty items like the Ultimate Halo Companion DVD Set. Also, if you put the keyword Halo into the Books search category, you'll find Halo: The Flood, Halo: Fall Of Reach, the Prima Strategy Guide, the Sybex guide, and a pre-order link for Halo: First Strike.) Rampancy, like any fansite, costs money to run. (Hey, we're not complaining, we're doing this voluntarily.) But any help we get from Halo fans who buy through our shop would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Shacknews points out two more Halo reviews today: one from Jolt.co.uk and another from Gamers Pulse.