After three successful and acclaimed XBox games featuring Master Chief, an RTS called Halo Wars, Halo:ODST and the forthcoming Halo: Reach it is obvious that this has turned into an incredibly profitably franchise for Bungie and Microsoft and it shows no sign of slowing. This latest entry into the franchise is a collection of seven animated stories available on Blu-ray and DVD.
The first story, Origins (by Hideki Futamura), is actually a tale of two parts and is a retrospective of the story of Halo and what has led up to the point of the Earth - Covenant war. The first half focuses primarily on the story of the ancient race of Forerunners and how they were faced with a threat they were not prepared for - the parasitic species known only as The Flood. Eventually the threat of the flood got so bad they they constructed the Halo weapon which wiped out all life in the galaxy and was then re-seeded automatically using samples the perished forerunners had collected beforehand. It was a last ditch attempt at wiping out the parasitic species, one which they gave their own lives to destroy to protect the younger civilisations.
Cortana, who is telling the story whilst adrift in space after the events of Halo 3, also casts a critical eye over humankinds lust for war and how it has driven the species forward at the same time as finding new ways to kill each other. We see a brief history of human conflict throughout the ages, and how our species ran out of space and so started to colonise other worlds and continued to fight amongst ourselves until we encountered a coalition called The Covenant. The Covenant saw humankind as heresy to their gods and sought genocide until both sides were attacked by a re-emerging threat - The Flood. The story then continues into the events of the games and how the Halo's were discovered and fought over.
The third story, "The Duel" (produced by Mitsuhisa Ishikawa), uses a very different style of animation which looks like animated oil paint to create a very impressionist look and feel. Rather than focussing on the story of the humans it takes a look at the lifestyle of one of the species in the Covenant and the life of an Arbiter. This particular Arbiter, Fal, doesn't agree with what the Covenant is doing and is going to openly oppose them to keep his honour. In the way the clothing and belief system is structured it is given a very Samurai sort of feel, and to maintain his honour Fal is drawn out into battle whilst his wife is killed. When Fal realises this he faces her killer in duel which neither combatant survives. During this final duel their are some rather unique animation styles used which although the characters are not moving for most of it the style provokes a senses of fast, precise movements; similar to what you would expect from samurai.
Homecoming (directed by Koichi Mashimo and Koji Sawai) uses more traditional animation techniques to the story of the Spartan-II recruitment program as a series of flashbacks during a battle in which the Spartan-II known as Daisy provides backup for some of the UNSC soldiers who are trying to fall back from their positions. During the flashbacks we learn that the Spartan-II program took children at a young age and replaced them with "flash clones" which were short lived and imperfect, so that no one would question the disappearance of 75 candidates. Over the following years they are trained and augmented with biological and mechanical enhancements to turn them into super soldiers capable of quelling the insurgencies and later the Covenant threat.
It has a 9.7" IPS multi-touch display (1024 x 768 native resolution with 132ppi), and is only 0.5" thick and weighs around 1.5 pounds. The CPU is a 1GHz Apple A4 and comes in 16Gb, 32Gb, and 64Gb versions. Connectivity isn't too bad with it supporting Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. In addition to the GPS it also includes accelerometer and compass which means the battery life could never be expected to be great considering the screen size, and they're reporting it to be around 10 hours. So this means in practice you're probably looking at around 6 hours.













