Viper tries to get Dr. Lime in a compromising position (or two) during the course of the latest Mailbag at Battleground: Halo.

Louis Wu at HBO has pointed out a writeup of the Offensive Tetraboxing LANfest he held recently. This one's by CYBRFRK, and it's called Cold plasma still sticks... Friendship, loyalty and gaming - the ideology of bungie.org. The writeup is great, and so are the photos.

SketchFactor pointed us through Truth & Reconciliation to a page at iGames where they are summarizing the Halo for Windows Worldwide Final results.

Webshift posted on the HBO forum that the makers of Nightmare Armor are doing a raffle. $5 gets you a chance to win a Master Chief's helmet.In other news, the pricing has been removed from the site due to some legal concerns, but they haven't been changed or reduced (darn).

Over in the HBO forum, RunningRiot voiced the common-enough question: why in-game and out-of-game pings to Halo servers often don't match up. Botman from Gearbox stopped in to provide the answer:

Forum Administrator Tonya Welch posted in one of the CPL forums that Halo will not be cut from their summer event; apparently the earlier threats to that effect caused some amount of controversy. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

Walshicus has drawn up an extensive map of the Halo universe drawing on the games and novels. It features three-dimensional coordinates for many locations, both as an image and as an Excel worksheet. He submitted it to HBO and Louis Wu put it up in their Miscellaneous section.

A BBCi article compares the experience of Halo LANfesting with watching porn as part of an examination of how popular Halo still is years after its initial release. But don't worry, it's a compliment:

But there is something genuinely special about a gathering for some offline multiplay, replete with booze, snacks and stream of banter, by turns good-natured, competitive, foul and surprisingly witty.

Sounds like he was at Louis Wu's last LANfest.

According to MacSoft, this second-in-24-hours patch for Mac Halo fixes "a random memory trasher in Halo's input system" which may have been causing the keyboard problems some reported with the 1.04 patch. This update also has a page at VersionTracker now, and is available from Rampancy (http://rampancy.net/machalo/halo_103-1041_updater.sit) and from RHL.

Editor's Note: The following is a press release sent to Rampancy by AEG. Click the "read more" link at the bottom of this summary to read the entire article, including a list of finalists.

Microsoft Game Studios today announced that 19 gamers representing nine nations will be duking it out on February 17 at the Halo® for Windows® Worldwide Championship in Los Angeles, California. The Halo for Windows Worldwide Championship is a truly global event; spanning more than 275 iGames centers and worldwide partners gaming centers across five continents, including locations in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Australia and the United Kingdom. The exciting championship and semifinal rounds will showcase some of the world's greatest Halo talent. Halo fans are invited to stop by and catch all the action, which starts at 1 p.m. PST on February 17. >From 6-10 p.m. PST, all fans are invited to come play Halo for free in a LAN frag-fest on 60 PCs.

This update synchronizes the Mac version with the PC version 1.04 allowing cross-platform multiplayer to again function. Requires Halo v1.03. NOTE: You should disable your anti-virus software before running the updater. If you are reinstalling Halo, you need to first download the 1.03 update and install it prior to installing the 1.04 update.

Download: http://rampancy.net/machalo/halo103-104_updater.sit

If you look at Randy Pitchford's .plan file through Blue's News, the project listings there are the same as they've been for some time:

1. Halo PC
2. Secret Sauce

"Secret Sauce" might have been the Halo Editing Kit before that was announced, but it might be something else all together.