Last time I wrote about whether or not there really is something you can call a "Halo Community". What the question really is, of course, is whether or not that community is like the old Bungie communities were, just larger-- or is something else entirely, and if that something else is a good thing or not. I think the Halo community is something different, not only because the installed base of gamers, first on the Xbox and now (finally) on PCs and Macs, is much larger, but because of the way Halo was on the Xbox (no mods or out-of-the-box Internet play) and the way it is now on the PC (Modding possible but difficult with no official tools yet released, no interoperability with the Xbox version). This isn't necessarily bad, and Bungie fans, both new and old, being an imaginative and dedicated bunch, have made the best of it: fan films, fan fiction, comic strips, and so on. But some of the elements of old Bungie communities, namely mods and ranking, are missing. Halo modding may never reach the level that Marathon and Myth modding did. The game engine is more complex, the methods required more advanced, the file sizes much larger. There will probably never be the sheer proliferation of fan-made Halo levels that there were for Marathon and Myth. Some may say that is a good thing, echoing the axiom that 95% of everything is crap, and so most of the fan-made Halo levels that will never get made would have been not worth the download anyway. Of course, if that follows, and there are only ever 10 fan created levels made, that means nine of them will suck and only one of them won't, which is a depressing prospect. But whether or not Halo modding eventually hits a technical brick wall may or may not be the point, because while at the same time the release of PC and Mac Halo have made this now a practical possibility, whereas Xbox hacking was open only to a few brave souls, what is coming in the future may attract the community's attention away from this.