The Bungie crew was out in force-although they seem to be doing some nametag sharing. Alex Seropian, Peter Tamte, Hamilton Chu, Matt Soell, and others were here... but so was Brian Hines (wearing a Jim Ruiz nametag) and an unnamed TSI rep (Bungie's new PR firm), dressed like a true Bungie Babe (slinky evening dress) and wearing a Jennifer Ho nametag.

Since Claudes report came in, I have found out that was Jim. and the Bungie Babe is named Anna.

There were some technical glitches, so the BungieTV setup wasn't ready when expected, and there were only 4 machines running Oni, instead of 6. (There were no machines running anything else, and it looks like that's going to be true for the rest of the show.)

Oni looks quite good, except for the fact that all four machines locked up several times over the course of the day... "given that there's still quite a ways to go with it, it's remarkably stable." (The one chance I had to actually play it, the machine was locked from the time I sat down... I never got another chance.)

Clem Freeman and Miguel Chavez made appearances, as did Marty O'Donnell of Total Audio. Clem had his digital camera (Matt didn't seem to happy to have his pic taken while sweating profusely... he and Alex had just returned from a Radio Shack run for more video equipment), and Miguel his video camera. Should be some fun footage there.

Marty was quite fun to talk to, and offered several bits of interesting information:

He's been playing Oni and Halo pretty much non-stop since E3 last year (Special note here...playing Halo is a bit misleading since it's not at that point yet and it's not really fair to compare to Oni.(although he still finds time for real work),and both run fine on his old Dell with a Voodoo2 card in it. (That should make folks on the Halo forum happy, I don't know how worried the Oni community is.)

He also said that they (Total Audio) are now gearing up to do the Oni music... there are already a few Power of Seven tracks, but Total Audio is going to do much of the in-game music, and the cutscene pieces... that's just getting started.

Matt would say nothing more than it's still on schedule, and that most of the work done over the past few months have been 'under the hood'... not visible, but vastly improving gameplay.

On another Bungie Note: I caught the first half of the first round of the Marathon portion of
the MacWorld Gaming Championship... Michael Garrison (Cybernator) was handily in the lead at that point. Interestingly enough, all four players in that round were keyboard-only players... prompting some interesting comments from the crowd.

Doug Zartman had this to add to Claude's report that I thought was very interesting:

"FYI - everyone at Bungie was a keyboard player until Regier showed up to work on Infinity - he was our first mouser."

More tomorrow...