Halo and Dead or Alive Come Together
Here’s one we couldn’t, and maybe wouldn’t have tried to conceive. A press release from Tecmo, distributors of Team NINJA’s Dead or Alive series of fighters has confirmed partnership rumors of sorts to bring a character and environment to the Dead or Alive battlegrounds for winter’s Xbox 360 and DOA 4 release.
The character and the Halo-inspired fighting stage will be featured as unlockables for the fighter. According to the release, the idea came about 2 years ago at E3 when Bungie’s Pete Parsons and Team NINJA’s Tomonobu Itagaki, met at the annual Expo.
According to Parsons: “The opportunity to work with Team Ninja and combine our powers to strike yet another blow in our quest for world domination, was too alluring to pass up,” “Plus, we just think the idea of putting a Spartan into a DOA game totally kicks ass.”
That spartan, however, isn’t going to be who you’d expect. Early speculation had Cortana, Master Chief’s digital guide as the likely fighter. Instead, Master Chief will likely be off to the side oggling over Spartan-458, a female space marine created by Bungie (complete with back-story) and put into action by Team Ninja. According to Bungie’s weekly update, Spartan-458 doesn’t ‘jiggle’ like most of the DOA hotties and will look out of place at first, but they promise she’ll fit in perfectly with the fighters.
The cross genre/developer idea isn’t necessarily all that new either. Namco released Soul Calibur 2 on each of the three big systems, sporting characters from other games, the most popular of which was Link, from Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda franchise, who proved himself a worthy fighter against the SC regulars.
