Hot on the heels of the PC release of Halo v1.04, Destineer subsidiary MacSoft has released a patch to bring its Macintosh conversion of Halo to v1.04. The new patch guarantees that Mac users and PC users stay in lockstep when playing against each other online.
Halo is the 3D action game developed by Bungie for the Xbox. It made its way to the Macintosh courtesy of MacSoft last year, following its release on the PC by Gearbox and Microsoft. The game puts players in the role of the Master Chief, last of a kind cybernetically enhanced human soldier, as he pits a ragtag crew of human soldiers in a last-ditch conflict against a warlike alien force called The Covenant. The battle takes place on a giant ringworld that may hold the secret to humanity’s salvation, or destruction.
The code in the patch addresses an issue involving GameSpy, the online game matching system. The issue is a “security hot-fix” that addresses a crash bug that could occur if a hacker tries to exploit the CDKey software development kit (SDK) on either Mac OS X or Windows.
The patch’s release is a nice turnaround for MacSoft, which released the Halo patch only a day after the PC version was updated. Halo’s last Mac release, 1.03, trailed the PC release by almost a month and a half — the PC version was updated at almost the same time as the Mac version’s initial release.
The 2.4MB patch requires users to have the 1.03 version installed. It can be downloaded from nikon.bungie.org or an alternate mirror. You may also want to check Macgamefiles.com if you have problems with those links. Macgamefiles.com reports that this patch may possibly cause a problem with walking (the W key makes you go backwards). Please use caution when applying this patch.
Update: Late on Saturday MacSoft released a 1.04.1 patch that can be downloaded from Macgamefiles.com (link above). This release purportedly corrects the W key problem that came to light in the original 1.04 update.