We've included the lately-released screenshots of PC Halo, including new hires shots of the new levels and the new Rockethog, in our PC Halo Gallery. The screenshots were provided courtesey of Louis Wu at HBO.

TankRamp at Battleground: Halo has pointed out a preview of PC Halo by Shinji over at Eurogamer. Read up!

The first video of single-player action on Halo PC has been put up at GameSpy's FilePlanet; it's a 158.8 Mb zip file. (No idea yet what kind of media file is in there, but I'm guessing some kind of Windows Media.)

Zandervix at MBO has passed on word from MythDev that they're looking for help with their next phase of Myth development; they're looking for programmers, illustrators, modelers and beta testers. Anyone interested can contact them.

Gearbox's new PC Halo screenshot features the re-skinned Warthog, complete with rocket launcher... and new seat covers! We've added it to the PC Halo gallery.

firestorm225, who attended the recent Fanstock event, has put up a forum post at Modzone's gaming forum about the trip. IGN, he says, will have a more in-depth article later.

Some of the tidbits I haven't seen elsewhere: The rocket bugs that affect the Xbox version have been fixed. There will be a demo version available after the release. And coop play is still a possibility for post-release.

Thanks to CobaltNova who posted about it in the HBO Forum.

HomeLan Fed (an outfit that hosts gameservers, and also hosts Penny Arcade) was also at Fanstock; John "JCal" Callaham did a writeup. Thanks Louis Wu.

GameSpy's Sal "Sluggo" Accardo also has a writeup on Fanstock. More tidbits? OK. PC Halo will let you save multiple checkpoints per level. (Hurrah!) More thanks to Louis Wu.

We've collected a list of all the writeups we've seen in the past few days on our Fanstock Articles page.

Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, the man who provided most of the information about PC Halo during the recent Fanstock event, has been interviewed by Computer and Video Games. Highlights include the fact that playing as the Covenant-- originally a central idea in Halo's design, pre-buyout-- was discussed and rejected. And while bots will not be in the game as shipped, the possibility exists for something in the future:

One is that the network architecture was re-written, so if we were to do bots, we'd start it now, which means the product would take even longer. This may still happen - I mean BotMan, the guy who created the foundations for all of the Half-Life and Counter-Strike bots, he works at Gearbox! He sits in that office right over there [points]. We'd like to expose this stuff to mod authors to see what they come up with.

Adding to the list of writeups, Louis Wu has put up HBO's coverage of the Halo PC Fanstock event. It features quite a few photos, and there's a promise that in the next few days there will be screenshots as well. One particlarly interesting tidbit that I didn't see elsewhere:

Shishka has taken his excellent HaloPC Pre-Release FAQ 1.0 and upgraded it to 2.0, adding information collected at the Fanstock event at Gearbox's headquarters this past weekend. The new or updated items are marked in red.

A lot of sites have now been updated with words and images from Fanstock at Gearbox's headquarters in Texas.

Subnova features pictures and text from Shishka, and Steve from Forerunners.org has posted an update at the PC Halo Map Database site, Cortana.org.

Cortana.org, incidentally, has now launched-- instead of just a logo, they've got their site design in place, and there's a special page for Fanstock coverage.

Dark Helmet from Battleground: Halo has also put up a writeup for the event, and then added some images as well.

Several years ago, we heard on the Rampancy Hotline server that Halo was going to be "the most customizable Bungie game ever."

[image:3805,left] That was, of course, before Microsoft purchased Bungie and Halo was changed into an Xbox game. Now it looks as if that prediction is finally coming true.

Along with the news that Gearbox intends to make Halo's editing tools available for download on their site after the release of Halo for the PC, we also received some screenshots of those very same tools, including the Halo level editor, Sapien. However, we aren't allowed to release those screenshots until... sometime later.

What we can do, however, is to share with you some photos taken and provided graciously by Steve of Forerunners.org, who attended the event and brought a digital camera with him. We've put those in a special Gearbox Fanstock gallery created just for this event. When the screenshot embargo ends, that's where they'll be.

Steve of Forerunners.org has supplied some of the bits of information he's been able to glean while down at PC Halo Fanstock at Gearbox Software in Plano, TX.

• PC and Mac versions of Halo will not be released simultaneously. The Macintosh version is not yet as far along as the PC version. (Westlake Interactive still lists the Mac version as "pre-Alpha" as of this writing.)
• Level editors will not ship with the game, but be downloadable from Gearbox, along with (hopefully) some tutorials.
• It is unknown at this time whether there will be a Mac version of the editors.
• The Halo editor is comprised of three programs.
• The Halo level editor is called "Sapien".
• The shapes and physics editor is called "Guerilla".
• PC Halo has six new multiplayer maps. Many draw on the original game's solo maps for inspiration. They are:
  • Death Island
  • Timberland
  • Ice Fields
  • Danger Canyon
  • Gephyrophobia
  • Infinity
• PC Halo is one of the quickest loading PC games ever. It is reported to load in approximately three seconds.
• PC Halo has two weapons not in the original (unhacked) Xbox release: the flamethrower and the fuel rod gun.
• User-created netlevels will be about 18Mb in size.
• User-created solo levels can be up to about 100 Mb.
• System requirements under Windows will be around a 700 Mhz processor (assuming P3 or P4, not sure), a "good" video card, and 128Mb of free RAM.
• There is a new version of the Warthog with three cannons on top.
• After playing a bit of Halo on the PC, the guys got to watch the same realtime demo of Halo 2 given at E3, and got to play a little Halo 2 themselves on Xbox dev kits. Observers report that Halo 2 is graphically much improved over the original.
• PC Halo will ship on 1 CD, not on a DVD as the Xbox original did.

We will update this item throughout the day as more information becomes available.

Another short note at Forerunners.org promises that Cortana.org, which has been largely dormant for awhile, will update. At the moment there's naught but a logo there, but it does say "The Halo PC Map Database" which seems to imply what the site's eventual intent is. Not sure how long that logo has been there, so apologies if this is old news.

Steve's posted a short note from Gearbox today, where he is attending the PC Halo Fanstock event:

Met some really great people at Fanstock this weekend. I have the privilege of sitting in Gearbox right now. There seems to be an abundance of Half Life games everywhere. Halo PC is of course why we are all here.

F.org, as well as other sites attending the event, should have more updates throughout the coming hours and days.