Rampancy

Mhaddy of The Junkyard informed us of a new Oni review up at the ESC Mag website. This one is somewhat more positive than yesterday's.

What we found out, however, is that when you stop playing this game, you soon come back for more, despite its quirks. It has great appeal, and it's fun to play. The AI is spectacular -- make too much noise, and they find you. Peek out from a wall or column, and a wide assortment of rifles might zero in on your position. Take a wrong turn, and you'll be double-teamed until your opponents beat you down. All good stuff. But too much of the high score we finally settled on (after more than a little argument) is based on promise.

Oni gets 8 out of 10 keys. Looks like the flow of reviews is starting to slow down.

Heh, I was originally going to post a quickie assessment and some links for each title, but the post quickly mutated into the news post to end all news posts in typical Noc-style. So instead, I'll link you to the community forum, where others may better slice, dice and respond to the information I've got. As I spend most of my time paying attention to Halo, I've no doubt that some of you in the community will have further insight and information to offer the whole. The titles listed in today's roundup include C&C Renegades, PlanetSide, TeamFortress 2, Tribes 2 and Unreal 2.

• Forum: Keeping Up with the Competition

3rd party stuff for Oni just got a bit more distant. Matt (of Bungie) has commented in the Oni Central forum about the possibility of the Oni tools being released to the public:

I don't think any of the Oni tools will see a public release, mainly because we don't own Oni anymore, but then I didn't expect us to ever release the Marathon source. Stranger things have happened.

Erm... not good. It didn't seem like Bungie was going release any editors, but the little hope that we had is now gone. Thanks, Rolf.

Addendum: I hadn't noticed this at the time, but it's important to note that the date on the post is 10/5/00. While it's not new information, it currently stands anyway. Thanks, Modem.

Tired of the rolling resets? Apparently Bungie is too. Mordia has announced at the bungie.net website that there will no longer be monthly rolling resets, but rather full resets every 6 months. Here's the reasoning behind the decision:

The complete rational behind this decision is perhaps complicated, but in short, it comes down to the fact that we don't like rolling resets and no one but me thought it was a good idea to reset a random player on a daily basis. After much discussion and arguing back and forth, both for and against rolling resets, random resets and full resets, this is the compromise and solution we agreed to.

The next full reset will be in early June this year.