And now, for a few moments, we venture into the breach that straddles the realm of the official announcement and the territory of the unfounded rumor.

Infininight at Myth Village has posted that Mythforums and marius net will be supporting orders; the .orderlist command will list online users in the same order as you.

There's more information at marius net.

Zandervix at MBO has posted about two new tournaments: Tournament Of Kings 2x2 and Tournament of Kings Man Team FFA. More information is at http://www.mythportal.com/~tok.

Zandervix posted at MBO that the PlayMyth ranked server will have a full reset on June 1.

A short article at computerandvideogames.com is confirming what's been said by Bungie all along, that there will be no separate Halo Online title, but the version of Halo that will first use MS' Xbox Live gaming service will be a full sequel.

In other words, Halo 2 looks officially announced at this point, even if there are no other details available.

Xbox.ign.com has a rather detailed article about what MS intends to do with Xbox Live.

All Xbox Live games will use voice communication, using a Voice Communicator module that plugs into the top slot on the controller. Your Xbox Live ID will be transportable to different Xboxes via the memory card. The system will track stats, and match players who have equal skills a good connection to you.

Sometime in the future, we may all have our hands on the game that Bungie originally intended to make when they began work on Halo.

And no, we're not talking about the Mac/PC version (which, by the way, will still happen, as far as everyone knows).

No, we're talking about a version of Halo featuring online multiplayer for MS' Xbox Live gaming service that is slated to begin beta testing later this year.

While Butcher has advised me that this is old news, I'm posting it in blatant defiance of his better judgement. Inside Mac Games has posted an item on Microsoft's DirectPlay, and Apple's answer to it:

A couple of years ago, Bungie developed a cross-platform game networking API called Uber ...

[whack]