While it continues to disappoint me that the otherwise-excellent McFarlane Halo line is in a 5″ and not a 6″ scale, one figure I’d love to get in any scale is the Mark V suit from the first Halo. I’m not sure whether Joyride Studios somehow still has the rights to the first two games, or whether McFarlane just hasn’t bothered to pick up the license for anything other than Halo 3.

However, a good compromise might be a 5″ version of the Halo Wars armor, which is supposedly the Mark IV suit. Hence my extreme interest when the mysterious photo above appeared in a Figures.com article a few weeks back. After some searching, I was finally able to get confirmation that a 5″ Halo Wars Spartan is indeed in the works.

On a related note, it occurs to me that the concept of increasing resolution in videogames is a good metaphor for what happens with things like Star Trek, where the aesthetics of the technology (and the technology itself, to a degree) improves with each iteration despite taking place in the same time period. Using the metaphor, the new Star Trek‘s Enterprise is a higher resolution version of the original ship, while the Mark IV suits in Halo Wars look better than the Mark V suit of Halo: Combat Evolved thanks to improvements in videogame technology. When I think about it in those terms, I’m less bothered by how different the new Enterprise looks from the original series.

Here’s some comparison shots to show what I’m talking about.

Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) Mark V suit vs. Halo Wars (2009) Mark IV:

1967 Enterprise vs. 2009 Enterprise (click for larger version):