Gladius, day 6: Ursula decided to return to her home planet

So, there, it’s done. 62 hours and 22 minutes from the start to the end of the game, LucasArt’s near forgotten cinematic tactical strategy gladiatorial combat RPG defied all my expectations. The last time I blogged about Gladius, I’d just left Imperia for the Windward Steppes. That gave us the last group member, Eiji, an archer, who was more than she first appeared. But who didn’t know that? Continuing on to the Southern Expanse brought us a cutscene where one of the many evil villains dogging our steps said she would be sending someone to us who would bring us right to her, followed by a new character joining us immediately afterward. ...

November 22, 2021 · 5 min · 888 words · Tipa

Gladius, Day 3: Hail, Imperia

After adding another hero and a minotaur to their motley crew, the Viking twins conquer the fighting pits of Imperia and set their sights windward. I just spent an hour writing a shell script to take the PNG files that PCSX2 generates for screenshots into resized, blog-friendly JPG files. I do and do and do for you all :-) (…and now I just rewrote it in Python) (…and now I asked GitHub Copilot to rewrite it for me, which it did.) (and now I just rearranged my Github folders). ...

November 14, 2021 · 5 min · 1033 words · Tipa

Gladius, Day 1: Gladiators at Large

Welcome to the start of my playthrough of LucasArts’ “Gladius”, a tactical arena fighting game for the PlayStation 2. Wow. What to say about this game? I first heard about this game only a couple of weeks ago – I guess I’d entirely missed it when it came out in 2003. I ordered a copy from eBay. It arrived yesterday; popped it into the PCSX2 emulator and it came right up. ...

November 4, 2021 · 4 min · 662 words · Tipa