DOA4's Halo char is Spartan

Bungie's confirmed that the Halo character set to appear in Dead Or Alive 4 is Spartan 458, effectively a girl in a Master Chief outfit. "Those shots are real," says Bungie's weekly update. "They are taken from an early iteration of the character by [DOA4 developer] Team Ninja."

Bungie reckons she looks "totally natural" even without a gun, and has an "awesome" fighting style. "And wait until you see her special moves and counters. And yes, we know what her back-story is, because we created it. We'll tell you about it soon."

As you can see from the shots floating around, Spartan 458's DOA stage will be as familiar to Halo fans' eyes as her iconic armour - in fact, it's probably the closest you'll come to seeing next-gen Halo on Xbox 360 in the coming months.

The American and European Xbox 360 launch line-ups have yet to be revealed, but during its pre-TGS briefing Microsoft Japan said that DOA4 would be among seven games available at the Japanese launch on December 10th. That said, it had also claimed that Ghost Recon would be among them - and that's since slipped.

In other words, we're not quite sure when DOA and Halo fans will be able to wrap their thumbs around Spartan - or even how and where she's made available in the game - but as soon as we hear something we'll let you know.