Catherine Halsey's Journal - Halo Reach

So bundled in with Halo Reach alongside the game and the oh-so-pretty statue of Noble Team was a reproduction of Catherine Halsey's journal. The gimmick being that she took the time to handwrite her journal despite living in the 26th century where everyone uses computers. She does this to avoid hackers getting her secrets and to give gamers a collectible to justify the higher cost of the special editions. But it's such a nice collectible. :)

Catherine Halsey writes about Cortana

It comes inside a "hidden" compartment of the game box with a note included about how this was smuggled out to you so someone outside the military would have a record of everything that happened with the Spartan-II program and the events of the final days of the colony on Reach. Included are tons of little extra bits and pieces - news clippings, a Spartan-II patch, and Halsey's own security pass tucked into the pages as a bookmark.

The first thing that struck me about this little slice of the Halo storyline is that Halsey writes in her journal even less than I blog. :) Seriously - sometimes she writes three times in a week, and then nothing for three years!

There's not much of a story in this journal but it is a fascinating insight into the mind of a woman who oversaw a program involving abducting children, genetically and cybernetically enhancing them and training them to be super soldiers, knowing that it was quite likely the best of a set of terrible choices to hold the human colonies together in the face of civil war, and later the only hope against alien invasion.

Halsey is only vaguely mentioned in the games to date, but her influence on characters such as Master Chief John-117 and Cortana is clear from early on, so it's interesting to hear what the woman herself thinks during the creation of the Spartans, the first contact with the Covenant and the glassing of Reach.

Shame when you meet her in the game itself, she's a real bitch. :)