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Late last night, Bungie released the long awaited Oni demo, just as Matt Soell promised earlier this week. After an astounding amount of hype and a seemingly endless development period, Mac gamers will finally get a taste of what was being cooked up in the dungeons of Bungie for the past three years. To give you an idea of how long we've waited to see this game completed, IMG did a hands-on preview of the game in early Summer 1999!

The Oni demo includes a training level to help you get accustomed to the controls and the various moves your alter-ego Konoko can perform, as well as levels one and four from the full game. There is also an anime-style animated introduction.

System requirements are not listed in the readme file, but you will need a G3 or G4 processor, 128 MB of real RAM, and a 3D video card to play the demo. Also, it seems that a two-button mouse is required, as there is no way to simulate a right-button click. Bungie does include a list of known issues though:

[All Systems] Animated cut scenes are choppy and audio slurred. This may be caused by low RAM or hard drive space, try freeing up hard drive space to fix.

[OSX Beta] Mouse tracking is bound at the screen edge due to the lack of Input Sprocket support. If you run Oni in "classic" mode then this problem is not present.

[Microsoft Intellimouse] The Intellimouse control panel may conflict with Oni, causing loss of mouse control; disabling the Intellimouse control panel may fix the problem.

[ATI Rage Pro Graphics Card] Some graphic elements may not draw with the proper transparency due to hardware limitations of this graphics card. This may include certain particle effects and UI elements.

[Rev A iMac, 1st Generation beige G3 PowerMac] These systems come standard with the ATI Rage IIc graphics card, which is not sufficient to run Oni. Upgrading to a 3Dfx VoodooII / ATI Rage 128 or better will allow you run Oni on these systems.

Also, remapping your keys can only be done by editing the "key_config.txt" file in the Oni Demo directory. Make sure you remember your new keys, because the game constantly refers to the original key layout. For users of mice with more than two buttons, use the words "mousebutton#" (where # is a number) to assign a key to other mouse buttons.

Other than those minor oddities, the game is enjoyable and chock full of martial arts mayhem. The two year-old-graphics engine has a very unique style and can certainly keep up with modern game engines. The 75.5 MB demo is well worth the download.

Oni is Bungie's anime-inspired martial arts action game, which is now the property of Take Two Interactive and Gathering of Developers. It will be simultaneously released for Macintosh, PC, and Playstation 2, in late January/early February. [Update: MacGameFiles now has three mirrors listed for the demo, so if you had trouble before be sure and try again.]

Download Oni Demo (75.5 MB)

IMG Forum: Oni Demo Thoughts?

Bungie Studios

Gathering of Developers

Oni

Buy Oni

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