Bungie's Joe Staten, known for his best-selling book Halo: Contact Harvest and the last best hope for a good movie script for Halo 3, took the stage during the Microsoft's E3 Press Conference to show off a new trailer for the upcoming Halo 3: ODST. Like many others during the press event, Staten ditched the long-winded marketing speak for a single phrase, "Prepare to drop."

Starting from inside a pod, you're hurtling down to the planet as you see other pods being blasted apart, in the distance is a massive pole called the New Mombasa Orbital Elevator that rises through the clouds and into space. After breaking through the clouds, you see a massive starship at the bottom. A few seconds later, the massive ship starts a jump. You hear the voices over the intercom panic as the jump's nasty side effect, an EMP field, hits them and thus knocking them into you.

Thus begins the first map in the upcoming game, "The Rookie." Early on, Staten shows off ODST soldiers differ from the series' signature Spartans with access to sound-suppressed weapons and a new visor that comes with night vision mode. As you'll see in the above trailer, The Rookie picks up a piece of a detonator, which Staten says is just one part of the story and mystery of New Mombasa. Interestingly, ODST's story will lead you back in time in the weeks before the start of Halo 3. That detonator leads you into the storyline of another level that goes by the name of the ODST soldier in charge, Dutch. Tasked with setting up explosives on a bridge, Dutch needs to avoid fire from a Wraith and Covanant forces moving closer before moving up to a tower to set off the charges which take out the bridge.

Finally, a little help from fellow soldiers.

Staten also used the end of the trailer to announce that ODST's co-op mode, Firefight would be available for play by E3 attendees this week.

But the forces at Bungie are going to make life even more interesting as Staten showed off his company's other secret, a newly announced game or DLC called Halo Reach 2010. For those who by ODST when it arrives on 9/22/09, they'll also get access to Reach's multiplayer beta. What is Reach? From the cryptic taglines, "From the beginning, you know the end," we're thinking that it might detail one of the first alien invasions of Earth as you view the planet get socked by massive explosions during a night scene as you watch the power grid go down. Oddly, it looked similar to the scenes of Caprica's demise during the Cylon's second invasion in the Sci-Fi TV series, Battlestar Galactica.