Kudos to the fine fellows over at Onicore, who have scored what they (and we) have no doubt been waiting more than a year for: the Oni beta test is imminent. Citing Bungie's Doug Zartman and Matt Soell as their sources, they managed to obtain some tantilizing information:

Oni Central recently posted about some job offers at Bungie West. One is a slot for a Quality Assurance Intern that has been on Bungie's jobs page for awhile. (The link at the top says it's for Chicago, but the actual description specifies San Jose) There is also a new position listed for an Assistant Game Designer. If you think you've got what it takes, then head on over and take a look.

A week or so ago we found some new MP3 files that had been uploaded to RHL. They had some curious names and so after getting permission from Power of Seven, pestering some Bungie employees and some covert investigation it appears that they've been on the Mac Action Sack all along. Somehow they never made it to the public. At least... not as far as we've been aware. Therefore, we'd like to pop these up for your listening pleasure.

GameFan Online has been cranking out various post-E3 items and today - their sixth day of the GFO E3 Video Onslaught (Why couldn't it have been the seventh day?) - they've posted up some gameplay footage of Oni on the PS2. There's another videogame in the works named Onimusha that is getting some coverage at various sites as well, which may lead to some confusion for console gamers. Oni will just have to kick some musha butt.

Many of you have remarked on the simplistic damage modeling in recent Oni trailers/screenshots...big colorful flashes, but little blood or persistent evidence of impacts, and some have suggested that they've just turned it off temporarily while they're making improvements. Matt confirms this on the Oni Central forum:

Yep. Along with the marks left by bullets, blood will look much better than it used to.

Read the whole thread.

Aye, you already know about the scans from their article at OBO by now, but I did think it'd be worth pointing you to a picture of the cover. My fave image of Konoko... It's too bad she won't be looking like that in the game, but it's probably a good thing that she's not a Lara Croft clone.

Not sure if this is entirely sanctioned, but Oni Central has posted scans of an article from the June 2000 Gamer's Republic magazine. From Oni Central:

Just a little addition to the Oni item below: the ps2.ign.com Oni preview also has three small movies (around 3.5 megs each) posted for download. Can't comment on them yet, since they're still slogging their way through my connection, but they appear to be even newer than the E3 2000 demonstration movie. Definitely worth checking out.