It's coming out in less than three months and at E3 earlier this week we got to see a brief glimpse of one single player sequence of Halo 3, the long awaited Xbox 360 first person shooter from Bungie and Microsoft.

The sequence was from a portion of the first mission in the game (they didn't want to give up much in plot details) where Master Chief, some Marine buddies and the renegade Covenant Arbiter (voiced again by actor Keith David) are traversing through a forested gulch to join forces with your old pal Sargent Johnson and more Marines. Of course, the Covenant have other plans for you; the brief sequence showcased once again that Halo 3 will have some of the best game AI around with grunts, brutes and some new elite aliens throwing down some heavy fire on our position. The final part of the demo showed Sargent Johnson's Pelican drop ship being shot down. You as Master Chief can rip off a gun turret (the same as the multiplayer demo) to shoot down a Covenant alien hover craft, before taking on the rest of the ground alien forces.

In this particular demo, even our experienced Bungie team member couldn't finish the demo completely as the alien Elites proved to be too tough on the particular skill level. He died twice and then finally got to the final Elite before being killed again (we were told that the enemy was the final one for the demo anyway). Again its clear that playing through levels in Halo 3 will never be the same experience twice thanks to the AI; they know how to stay under cover, how to out flank your position and even how to use the new bubble shield. Visually the single player portion looks to be a huge improvement over the looks of the multiplayer beta with far more detailed character models and textures. It's not quite up to Crysis levels but its certainly going to please folks who might have been disappointed with the graphics of the beta.

We also got to see a demo of the expanded version of Halo 3's movie making feature which will allow people to view both single and multiplayer matches from pretty much any angle and at any speed. You can stop the action to look at a particularly pretty explosion, detach the camera to look at any part of the map and more. Because the movie feature uses game data rather than true video file sizes can be small and they can be uploaded so that others can see and play them. You can even take a screenshot in the game which is then uploaded in high rez to the Bungie.net web site where you can see a JPG picture of the shot.

The Halo series has become the Xbox franchise's biggest hit by far and it looks like the final product won't disappoint. The final version is due out September 25 but Bungie has pretty much confirmed that there will be additional downloadable maps released at some point.

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