Oni
Developed by: Bungie
Published by: Rockstar

How do I describe Oni? I describe it as a game that has been harshly overlooked by both it's creators and IP owner's. It is a game the envelops both 3rd person shooter mechanics and a fleshed out martial combat system. In fact; it's more fun to play with the martial art's than the fire arms after a few minutes of practice. There are cut scenes draw in an older format of anime and the missions are incredibly challenging. Having to find cover from enemies who either have guns or prefer to fight hand to hand; forcing you to plan how to approach each of your situations.

 So if the game has some interesting mechanics while also being developed and published by 2 of the big giants in game development, why isn't there a sequel or anything to provoke a remake? Let alone a mention from either of these two companies that they would want to go back to it? There are a few things to understand. Oni was developed and brought to the public by a company getting into consoles for the first time and a company who has had experience with the game console marketing. Rockstar was already sky rocketing with hits such as GTA before this title released and even further today with the Batman Arkham, both series are still a joy to play. Bungie back then, you could probably label them as a company that was an up and comer that was still getting their barrings in a market they don't know much about, since your making games for a console, you have to consider your engine, what it can support, what can the hardware support and how to manage controls, marketing and so on. They had released games such as Marathon on PC and we're gaining steam with what would make them famous, that being Halo and the buyout from Microsoft to put Halo on the Xbox. That and something else to understand is that Oni and Halo would be the first games Bungie would ever put on a video game console, or at least as far back as what I can dig up, so if I'm wrong, I admit to being wrong. Though this whole end is guessing and speculation on my end. What did hurt Oni the worse though in terms of everything was the lack of multi-player.

Oni was a 3rd person shooter and most shooters of this age had some type of multiplayer for matches, examples of this; you got Time Splitters, Quake, the original Doom after a few mods and Halo. Oni lacked multiplayer in general and had only a campaign mode by default. The reason this was decided was because of the same reason Nintendo had problems with Smash Bros. Brawl over internet matches. It wasn't because of the tripping though; mind you, it was because of the immense lag and processing power needed. This is old-generation-internet where the most you could get out of your connection for online gaming really wasn't much to write home over. Granted, you had real-time strategy games and first person shooters to work fine, though Oni is a mix of a fighting game and third person shooter together; you could argue that Oni can still be played if it was solely focused on shooting and that is doable with almost any FPS shooter since it's center your opponent in your camera and push a button, bang; though you can't argue with how fighting actions in a 3D-explorable map translate over a broadband connection with 20mbs of speed roughly; forgive me if I'm incorrect about the speed from the earlier years on the internet. Players who want to slug it out would try to input so many buttons to get combos started or their flow of fighting on the roll and the internet then didn't exactly have that type of power to pass back and forth such data fast enough to make the games fair or fluid. There was an experimental build created by the developers for the PC version of this title to play over a Lan connection, however even with computers hooked up on the same network, connections we're still lagging hard though it did work in the traditional meaning of the word though not enough to implement it. Why there couldn't be a basic Split-Screen PS2 multiplayer, I don't have a proper answer for. Either it could be because of the same lag issue or the Playstation didn't have the resources to support two players at once.

Nintendo had to overcome the same hurdles Bungie did when developing online matches with Smash bros. and their first attempt went almost as bad as Oni if not worse; history speaks for itself on that whole end. There is still a small cult following on this title, though it's not as active as it use to be. I would recommend searching them out; they have attempted and created their own multiplayer port for the PC, though I don't know if it's still being kept up to date or out of commission.