Halo 3 Recon Announced for Xbox 360

The next game in the ultra popular Halo series was officially announced during a Microsoft press conference at the Tokyo Game Show in Japan.

Halo 3 Recon is a prequel, taking place before the events of Halo 3. For the first time in the series, the main character won't be the famous Xbox mascot, Master Chief. The players will control an unknown ODSC marine instead.

Halo 3 was released last September for the Xbox 360. The game scored an impressive 94 metascore at metacritic.com and won a handful of "Game of the Year" awards in spite of several gamers feeling that the game did not live up to the massive hype. It held the mantle as the fastest selling video game ever until Grand Theft Auto topped it in April of this year.

Halo 3 is also Bungie's last game as a first-party developer with Microsoft Game Studios. Bungie left Microsoft Game Studios just a week after the launch of Halo 3 and became a privately held independent developer.

Microsoft Game Studios still owns a minority stake at Bungie; not to mention that the two are still working together on future projects, whether if it has to do with the Halo franchise or not. Halo 3 Recon is the first game from the newly established relationship between Bungie and Microsoft Game Studios.

The announcement for Halo 3 Recon was supposed to happen during the E3 2008 event held in Los Angeles earlier this July. It was controversially pulled back at the last moment as Microsoft wanted to show the game at a later date.

The Tokyo Game Show in Japan seems like a strange event to reveal Halo 3 Recon, especially considering that the Halo franchise never gelled with Japanese gamers. However it makes a lot of sense knowing that Microsoft is trying to create a presence in Japan with the unpopular (in the Japanese perspective) Xbox brand.

Halo 3 Recon is not the only Halo game coming out for the Xbox 360. Microsoft also showed Halo Wars, a real-time strategy game based in the Halo universe, during the same press conference. That game is set for an early 2009 release.