A couple of days ago, the Mac version of Halo was updated to 1.03, allowing Mac users to play with their PC brethren. The update also added a copy-protection scheme that required that the CD be in the machine in order to play Halo – a major change from the previous version. This change has caused quite a stir in the Mac community… with most people expressing displeasure. Yesterday, Inside Mac Games interviewed Peter Tamte, head of MacSoft, about why this change was made. If you’re a disgruntled Mac user… go read this. I was amazed by this snippet:

[…] we have physically tracked more units of Halo being stolen on the Internet than have been sold through stores so far.

Ouch!

SESpider has turned in Episode 12 of his Miniature Halo comic; check out that rockin’ plasma sword!

Macosxhints.com has made Mac Halo their software pick of the week, giving it a rating of 9/10 and writing a pretty positive review. Thanks to Jarvis Badgley for the heads-up!

Today’s Guest One One Se7en comes from Dark Impaler… and checks out the advantages of the MC’s new armor.

Eep – we forgot about our Comic updates today! FIrst up is Calvin and Halo – this time it’s the Warbow half of the tag team… and I gotta say, I was just IN that situation yesterday. Ouch.

On-X points out that halo-mods.com is holding a poll for your favorite mod; right now, MonoxideC’s Library Multiplayer map is winning, but there haven’t been many votes. If you mod your box, go add your vote! Update: I misunderstood – the voting is not just your average poll, it’s to determine the winner of their modding contest; the winner walks home with $1000. NOW do you want to vote? (Thanks to Plaz for clearing this up.)

Though we’d still love it if you used BitTorrent for your downloads, we’ve supplied the FTC team with a bunch of direct download links for FTC10. A pair of them are linked on their downloads page – go grab the 56 mb divx-encoded low-res avi (352×224), or a higher-quality-but-smaller QuickTime (400×260, 45 mb) from their site. We’ve got to be careful with some of that bandwidth; if the links stop working, come back here; we’ll have posted new ones.

gutupio pointed out new content (sponsors-only) at RedvsBlue.com. There’s a rejected version of the SpikeTV Video Game Awards trailer, and scripts for the first two Season 2 episodes. If you’ve tossed ’em a few bucks, jump on and grab this stuff!

Nice find by Mantis819 – Bungie has put up an official page about their HPC server hosting. (The servers aren’t new – just the credit to Homelan is.) What’s odd is that you can’t rent a server from Homelan directly! (Well, that’s not completely true. You can rent a 16-player Halo server from them for $0.98/hour… but Halo is not curerntly on their dedicated server list.) That may change, so if you’re happy with the quality of gameplay on the Bungie servers, keep an eye on these guys! Update: There is now an official news post from Homelan on the subject, as well. Check it out!

Wow, very cool. DocOctavius started with a shot from the Halo 2 announcement trailer… and morphed into the Nightmare Armor. Electronic to real, in 16 seconds. Movie link is in the forum post. (1.4 mb, quicktime format.)

Oops, careless – Homelan interviewed the leader of the Nightmare Armor team yesterday, and we forgot to post it! Some new pictures, and some tidbits that didn’t make it into the interview with Frankie at Bungie.net… worth a read! (Thanks to Battleground: Halo, where I saw this first.)

Evilburger has released the second of his ‘Subzero Rivalries‘ comics; I’m a little worried about the mental health of at least one of the characters. He should be releasing one or two comics every other week – so we’ve added a link to the bottom of our Comics page, for easy access. Thanks to MarkHawk for the heads-up.

For Windows XP users with Radeon cards – Nick points out that ATI has released a new version of its Catalyst drivers (4.1) that fixes a couple of Halo PC bugs. Grab this if you’re affected!

The HBO-Subnova Halo PC server has been updated to 1.03 again – what this means is that the wild and whacky gametypes pioneered on the HBO-GameDaemons server (but not playable there now – it’s offline) can be enjoyed by Mac and PC users alike! Go shoot some people. (And don’t forget to let Deimos know you’re grateful. I sure am.) If you’re a Mac user that’s just logging on for the day, and thinking “huh?” – go grab the 1.03 updater for Mac Halo!

On September 30, PC owners got the chance to play Halo on their computers. Mac users had to wait until December 12… but right at the time that Mac Halo was released, the PC version was PATCHED – and Mac and PC users couldn’t meet each other on the field of battle. It’s taken quite a while… but the Mac Halo 1.03 patch is being released now; you can grab a copy of it from our mirror list. The press release for this update can be found here.

The long-awaited Episode 10 of Fire Team Charlie has been released. If you’re a member, you can grab the very large (95 mb) Hi-res version… but for everyone else, what you want is the low-res (320×240, DivX-encoded) version; it’s available right now as a BitTorrent seed, and should be available by tomorrow morning as a direct download. QuickTime is coming soon, as well. This is a killer film; it ties together many, many episodes of FTC (including episodes that weren’t even part of the series!), and does so with some really nice film work. The low-res version is 56 mb (not bad for a movie that’s 11:30 long).

The Strong Than All gaming league has begun to talk Halo. Read an introductory blurb on our forum, or visit the site directly; If you’ve got a 5-man team, this might just be for you! Thanks to T3muJin for the heads-up.

If you feel like you’ve been left behind in terms of what’s known about Halo 2, head on over to Battleground: Halo; Banshee Ace has writted the first part of a series of articles spelling out where we are.

One One Se7en looks ahead… let’s hope we make it.

Halo: Resolution has finally gotten away from the lag gag… oh, wait, no, it hasn’t.