IGN's Gear site has reviewed Lik-Sang's SmartJoy Frag, an adapter that lets you use standard PS/2 mice and keyboards with Xbox games. Here's what they had to say about using it to play Halo:

Halo just works damn fine with the SmartJoy FRAG. Movement is as smooth as butter and being able to spin around or look anywhere quickly is a godsend. Our only complaint with this is that the vertical movement is slower than the horizontal, but that's not too big a deal. Hopefully Halo 2 has options for both.

Editor's Note: Not sure why, with the Xbox's input being based on USB, Lik-Sang has chosen to use PS/2 ports instead. It means that you'll need to use USB to PS/2 adapters if you have a USB keyboard or mouse. Also, be aware: although IGN speculates the device should work with Halo 2 as well, there's no solid evidence of this, and it's entirely possible that Bungie may have made, or may make, changes to Halo 2's input code to negate any advantage that the SmartJoy Frag might give to keyboard and mouse players.

Major Nelson's blog, Random Thoughts, today says that Microsoft is getting reports that XBL users with modded Xboxes are using them to cheat at certain online games, notably in Project Gotham Racing 2, where they are driving modified cars to gain an advantage.

Nelson promises that "additional security measures" have been initiated to keep these users off XBL.

Aero at Halo Impulse interviewed Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford about the port of Halo to the PC. Some of the answers are interesting:

Aero: Is there an alternative way to get a patch for halo CE other than getting 1000 players? Perhaps you could give us a wider range of options that the community can work towards?

Randy Pitchford: I used the 1000 player line as a publicly available metric for tracking how many folks are playing the game. What it really is about is a business concept of return on investment. Gearbox will cease to exist if it spends more than it makes. I think the best way to get more support out of Halo is to appeal to the folks that hold the keys - Bungie. Bungie owns Halo. If Bungie wants more support to happen, it will happen. I imagine they are very busy right now, though...

Well, not so busy as they were before last week, I imagine. But somehow it's still hard to imagine anything but PC Halo being orphaned and overshadowed by the impending release of Halo 2.

But perhaps most telling of Pitchford's remarks is this, although it works against just about everything else he says about PC Halo, including claims that it has gotten more post-release support than any other PC port:

As far as 1000 players, goes - I think if folks who are playing the game went out and evangelized it, it could happen. Instead, we find that the folks that are playing the game the most are also whining about it the loudest.

Doesn't that fact say something in itself? That those who play the game are the ones complaining? In other words, those who play PC Halo complain about it, and those who don't play don't mention it? That doesn't make 1000 simultaneous players sound possible at all.

GameSpot has two recent articles on the successor to the Xbox; one mentions that Microsoft is pledging to make it smaller, with a simpler design, at least in part to cater to the Japanese market, where the Xbox did not fare particularly well. The other mentions the attempts of the HD-DVD Association to get Microsoft to use their new media; Sony has already chosen the competing technology named Blu-Ray for the PlayStation 3.

Notorious peripherals maker Lik Sang is now promoting a device called the SmartJoy designed to allow gamers to use a mouse and keyboard instead of the usual controller to play games on an Xbox, including Halo. HBO pointed out some salient points about the item, and so has TeamXbox. Our take? While we were big supporters of the keyboard and mouse combo prior to Halo's release, we've now become so used to it that using WASD in front of the TV just wouldn't seem AOK.

As far as whether or not using a mouse and keyboard would give a player an advantage over those using gamepads, this post seems to indicate that Bungie may already have considered this and has a way to deal with it by limiting turn radius.

Major Nelson has posted up photos of the package the new Plantronics Halo 2 edition Game Com in-ear headset comes in. It looks cool. The package says it is "ear-gonomic." That makes my head hurt just reading it.

1Up has a story that brings together a "panel of Xperts" as they put it to talk about what Microsoft needs to do in order to make the sequel to the Xbox a success. One of the Xperts is none other than Alexander "The Man" Seropian, cofounder of Bungie and founder of Wideload Games, scheduled to release a Halo engine game next year.

BDGamer pointed out the article and chose Seropian's quote about the Xbox's size as an example of the text, noting that for Japanese living rooms it posed quite a challenge. Myself, I find more interesting his quote about hardware system power:

If you make the assumption that all systems in the next cycle are in the same ballpark, then it's not too relevant. I mean, Xbox is a more powerful system than PS2, and even though it did well, Sony still whomped it. This cycle wasn't decided by the hardware--timing, marketing, and software did that.

Interesting that backwards compatibility was not addressed...

Brian Towne of Mythica, who has so generously offered to host user-created media files under 8mb for free, suitable for linking to from Halo and Bungie-related sites, has graciously agreed to add rampancy.net to the list of allowable hosts. So if you have a picture you want to post in a forum comment, or in your blog, feel free. Rampancy supports BBCode for linking images, or HTML.

Looks like the work to upgrade Bungie.net and the new Seventh Column wasn't quite complete; the site is down again for maintenance at the moment. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Looks like Bungie.net is back, perhaps this time for good. The new 7th Column site is also up, and if you check your profile page while logged in, the XBL integration also seems to be working again.

If you haven't linked your XBL Gamertag with your Bungie.net login by now, go and read the FAQ on Bungie.net about how to do it.

Nick at Halo Mac Development writes that all the Halo Dev; sites now have a new shared forum system users of the old ones are encouraged to go register on the new forum system.

Ever since migrating Rampancy away from Ferrex's Frankenscript for news and WebBBS for the forum, we've missed the flexibility of comment index display that the latter system had. While we gained a lot of other features, I always missed one particular feature, which was that when viewing the body of a comment in WebBBS, you still see the display of the thread underneath. It makes navigating between comments much easier.

Now, for users that view comments in either the flat collapsed or threaded collapsed mode, our forum gets that feature back. There's no indicator in that index yet of where the comment you're viewing is placed, but hopefully we'll figure out how to add that soon.

The night-owls among you may have noticed that Bungie.net is at least partially back online, and with it, the new My Groups feature that replace the Chapters that were part of the old Seventh Column site seems to be nearly ready. Links to look for existing Groups or create new ones are on the Community page of Bungie.net along with the forums. Right now there's only one Group theme; a theme builder is coming soon according to Achronos.

Additionally, there's a FAQ called Groups 101 that explains what groups are and how they work.

At the moment, it looks like not everything is finished yet; the front page of Bungie.net still doesn't show all the recent news, and the integration with XBL doesn't seem to be online yet, but at the very least you can start reading up on the future of the Seventh Column or see what other users are saying about the new Column.

UPDATE: mrsmiley of Halo Babies and MSXL has put up an excellent summary of the pros and cons of the new system. Thanks Louis Wu.

Bungie.net will be down for a bit on the 23rd, according to SketchFactor, so that Bungie.net can be upgraded to pave the way for the new 7th Column site. Cool new things are afoot, stay tuned!