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:

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!