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OpenGlad is an open source version of one of my favourite DOS games, Gladiator, orginally a shareware action-RPG game by Forgotten Sages. I had great fun playing the unregistered shareware version of Gladiator 3.7D some ten(!) years back. Something about the charming little old school pixellated sprites and RPG-like team and character management keeps compelling me to play this game.

While this game supports multiplayer (up to 4) via hotseat, I’ve only been playing the singleplayer campaign recently, so the main focus will be on the singleplayer aspects today. There are supposedly 40+ missions in the campaign but I haven’t completed it yet since some of the missions are incredibly tough

In OpenGlad, you command and manage a team of characters in search of adventure and loot. There are 15 playable character classes to hire for your team, ranging to conventional soldiers, mages and clerics to rarely seen non-human classes like fire elementals or even gooey self-reproducing slimes.

Once you hired your team of adventurers, you can train them to increase their stats for them to better survive on the battlefields. The stats are broken down as follows (summarized from the README file):

• Strength: Strength affects melee (hand-to-hand) combat, as well as things like your weapon range.
• Constitution: Higher constitution increases hitpoints and rate of healing.
• Dexterity: Increasing dexterity improves ability to dodge, weapon’s accuracy and speed.
• Intelligence: Controls amount of ‘magic’ power, how fast this power regenerates, and the success of special abilities.
• Armor: Reduces the damage taken from enemy attacks.
• Level: Acts as a multipler for other stats and allows usage of special abilities. Every three levels of experience (1,4,7,10) provide certain character classes an additional special ability which can often turn the tide of a battle in your favour. Read more about the special abilities in this classes.txt included with the orginal DOS version.

After training your team, you’re ready for your first mission. Initially, you’re accompanied by powerful NPCs, but you’re better off controlling your own characters since NPCs do not belong to your team and thus are not trainable.

To control your character, use the * key on the numpad to access the Options menu (2,8 or 4 for the Options menu of the second, third and fourth player) and change your key preferences.

• Fire: Attack with ranged weapon or hand-to-hand combat if enemy is next to your character
• Yell: Calls for help. Press together with the Shifter key to summon other characters to fight with or defend you.
• Switching: Switch between characters. Pressing Shifter in conjunction with the Switch key will switch to the first characters of another character class.
• Special: Use special ability. Hold Shifter key to use associated special ability (e.g Teleport Marker is used when Shifter key is held down, otherwise Teleport is cast)
• Special Switch: Switch between special abilities for characters with more than one special ability.

Before … and After …

After killing every enemy on the map (basically any moving character on the map not wearing red), the FOES counter on the top right corner should then read 0 and move your character onto the Exit arrows (shown on radar as flashing blue dots) and press Y to advance to the next mission. The first ten missions are linearly arranged with the ones after the tenth grouped into mini-campaigns whereby you can decide the order to tackle them.

Exit in sight

If any friendly character on your team dies during battle, he/she leaves behind a heart gem which returns a portion of his/her training costs back to your treasury if collected by another member of your team. As an alternative, you can press Esc to abort the mission and replay again (perhaps at a lower difficulty level) or even retreat to a previously played map and play another mission. You can save between battles but not when in the battle itself.

Of course after each mission, you get a certain amount of gold based on your performance to train existing troops or hire new ones to bolster your little army.

Some tips to get you started:

• Remember to hire clerics, preferably more than one since clerics cannot heal themselves. When low on health, give the nearest Cleric a bump to heal your character.
• Remember to save game under Save Team in the Continue Game screen. I learnt this the hard way when I clicked Begin New Game instead of Continue Game while advancing to the next mission. Oops!
• I noticed in this game is that it’s cheaper to purchase a Level 4 character under Hire Troops than to upgrade a Level 1 character to level 4 under Train Team.
• Windows version unable to be run in full screen mode is a known issue.
• If you prefer to play at Skirmish (easy) difficulty, remember to set the difficulty (default : Battle (normal) when you start the game as the difficulty isn’t saved after you exit OpenGlad. The difficulty really ramps up after scenario 10 - Defending the Keep so that you might wish to keep the difficulty at Battle in the earlier missions as higher difficulty levels offer more XP for your characters.

Download OpenGlad 0.98 from the Snowstorm Entertainment site or visit the archived Forgotten Sages website (link courtesy of the Gladiator Yahoo! Games group).

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I have always enjoyed watching lone warriors of exceptional martial prowess clearing a bloody swathe through the ranks of the enmemy in CG trailers for games like the Korean MMORPG Soul of the Ultimate Nation (top) and the X06 trailer for Lost Odyssey (bottom).

© Webzen

© Mistwalker

While action-oriented RPGs like Diablo allow your hero to re-enact similar scenes and hack down enemies in droves, combat in these games is still essentially an abstract game of numbers for to-hit percentage, damage, armor effectiveness, etc.

Not in Kaos Kontrol’s Legion of Man You control a nameless fighter and hack through anyone foolish enough to stand in your way until the blood of every single enemy on the battlefield paints the ground red (or if you succumb to overwhelming numbers, of course).

By left-clicking, you swing your sword and slash any unfortunate soul within reach. Although combat sounds simplistic, timing your attacks becomes critical when you’re faced with multiple enemies as you’re vulnerable to attacks from certain sectors when your sword is currently slicing through the foe in front

Most of the enemy minions will fall to a single sweep of your sword but they’re numerous and can easily take you down in due time when you’re surrounded on all sides. Fortunately, you have a shield (right mouse button) to fend off frontal attacks and a spin attack (hold and release left mouse button) to slaughter all within a specific radius. It would be great if the shield could be used offensively to batter the enemies to your side or a running or charging attack was included to extricate yourself from sticky situations.

© Kaos Kontrol

In terms of aesthetics, Legion of Man is definitely influenced by the movie 300 from the loading screen to the character design of the forces arrayed against you especially the ungainly axe-wielding giant in Mission 3. Duel. Thankfully, your character doesn’t wear leather underpants like the Spartans in 300

The gameplay is very much similar to 10 Tons Entertainment’s sci-fi survival game Crimsonland, particularly the Modifiers system (Perks in Crimsonland) and the gameplay modes).

I prefer the gory melee combat with swords and axes in Legion of Man over the long-range high-tech firepower in Crimsonland as there’s nothing like evading a charging standard bearer and then plunging your sword into his back There’s some medieval ranged weaponry e.g crossbows available as power-ups to pick off advancing foes but you’ll be relying on your trusty sword and shield most of the time.

There’s plenty of graphical violence in Legion of Man e.g cleaving bodies into halves and loping off the heads of opponents so it’s definitely not for young and/or impressionable players.

BTW, if you get a black screen after the loading screen when you start the demo from the Windows Start Menu, press Alt+F4 to close the game and run the Legion.exe in the game folder instead - usually C:\Program Files\Legion of Man\.

Also if the game controls feel sluggish, turn down the resolution or as a last resort, disable shadows by editing Pcini.txt in the game folder and set shadowenabled to “0″.

Download the 45 MB demo over at GamersHell or visit the official site of Legion of Man to buy the game online @ $14.95 USD. (Haven’t seen it on retail shelves here in Singapore)

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After playing (and mismanaging the civil administration) in Rome : Total War for the past month or so, I find myself increasingly drawn towards the smaller scale and shorter battles in Slitherine Software’s Legion Arena instead.

Like Rome : Total War, you engage in tactical combat as the Romans against their enemies such as the Samnites, Gauls and Carthaginians. There’s also a shorter Celt campaign which is only unlocked after the main Roman campaign is completed. The Celt campaign requires slightly different tactics and strategies with their more offensively-oriented troop choices like the Celt naked fanatics as opposed to the more disciplined and tactically-flexible Roman legionnaires. For a preview of some of the historically-based battles you’ll fight in the two campaigns, check out the official Legion Arena site.

Early missions involve less than ten units on both sides on tiny battlefields (above). Before long, you’re tasked to take on the Gauls and Carthaginians in massive battles (below)

Each campaign is simply a string of set-piece battles lasting not more than five to ten minutes each, after which denarii (Roman currency) is rewarded to you to upgrade the weapons and equipment for existing units as well as to recruit new units to your army. Requistioning of replacements for casualties in your existing units is done by way of fame points which are generously allocated under the easier difficulty settings. Units with sufficient combat experience can be promoted which grants them statistics and skill increases as well as specialist combat skills like anti-cavalry bonuses or additional formations (below).

Unlike in Rome : Total War, you not only deploy your units before the battle proper, but also issue them default movement orders like advance to contact, charge or outflank the enemy. You’ll still be able to command them once the battle starts, but each command you give expends order points (slowly regenerates during battle) with better trained veteran units requiring less points to command, which I think simulates the nature of ancient warfare very nicely. The tactical engine is no slouch too and mistakes are severely punished in the later missions, like this massacre of cavalry (below) which futilely attempted to attack infantry in the close confines of a dense forest. Morale is also modelled in this game quite convincingly which is essential in ancient wars where enemies were more often defeated by routing them off the field rather than killing them to a man.

While Rome : Total War definitely has better graphics and a wider variety of units, gamers on a limited playtime may find the shorter missions and RPG aspects in Legion Arena more feasible. It also helps that Legion Arena is currently published as a Replaygem title in SG retailing at the very affordable price of $9.95

There’s the prerequisite war elephants in this game of course, but fans of siege warfare may be disappointed as Legion Arena only features field battles.

Download the 233MB demo or the 1.010 patch if you already have the game.

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Just a few weeks into 2008 and gamers have been blessed with not one but two lists of 100 +quality freeware games, the first originally compiled in Games for Windows magazine and currently available at 1Up.com and the other made by a industrious gnome. The Games for Windows version does stretch the definition of freeware quite a bit though by including some games that are apparently only demos - oh well as long as they’re good and free

On closer inspection, some of the games on both lists do look slighly similar attesting to the fact that great minds do think alike - or probably one of them hasn’t been doing his/her homework

Some of my personal picks from the two lists. Haven’t got time to take screenshots of everything when there’s so many games in the two lists to play with, so I’ve elected to use official screenshots from the game developers where possible

Games for Windows List

© Wolfire Software

Lugaru (Action Trip - Page 2) - Weird game featuring talking rabbits and kung-fu action. You’ll need to go through the tutorial to get the most of this demo though.

Gate 88 (Armchair Strategy - Page 6) - An unlikely mix of space shooter and base-building strategy. See those weird shapes? That’s my base

© Digipen

Toblo (Action Trip - Page 2) - Physics-based Capture The Flag game done as a project by five students at DigiPen Institute of Technology.

Gnome’s List

Dwarf Fortress (Unique weirdlings) - Actually known as Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, it’s a RPGish Dwarven society simulation complete with ASCII graphics. Wrote about it in March last year here.

© CrossCut Games

RuneSword II (Role Playing Games of the SFW kind) - A commercial project turned open-source, RuneSword II is a fun old-skool style RPG by CrossCut Games.

© The Battle for Wesnoth

Battle For Wesnoth (Strategy Games of all kinds) - A turn-based fantasy strategy game reminiscent of the classic Warlords II.

If 100 plus games aren’t enough, there’re always the excellent JayIsGames and PlayThisThing for quality flash/casual and indie games recommendations respectively, or my humble flash and game downloads archives

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Be the Bad Guys of A Shoot Em’ Up in Space Aggressor

Space Aggressor is an unique freeware real-time strategy game by RunTime Entertainment in which you play the commander of the bad guys of your typical shoot-em-up game. Your mission is to prevent Mr Lone Space Hero™ from wiping out your base of operations by all means necessary.

© RunTime Entertainment

Your base is defenceless against the enemy and must therefore rely on sending out spaceships (preferably in overwhelming numbers) to whittle the enemy hero’s spaceship down to tiny bits before he arrives and destroys the entire base. Estimated time of arrival is displayed in the left commander window and may vary when the Hero™ picks up a speed-up powerup (his progress is shown in the right hero window).

There’s a lot of choices that you have to make in tweaking your armada of spaceships from the weapon and shield configuration of each type of spaceship (a total of 5 types) to the formation of your spaceships, their targeting priority upon launch as well as the launch sequence for multiple spaceships (below). Once launched, spaceships will continually harass the enemy hero until they are destroyed.

© RunTime Entertainment

To build up your forces, you have the entire economy at your disposal whereby you can set the manufacturing and research priorities as well as adjust the ratio of workers on production (increase spaceship production speed), sales and resources which increase the rate of credits and resources acquisition respectively, both which are needed for manufacturing of spaceships as well as for research.

© RunTime Entertainment

Your production facilities can be assigned to either produce more workers to boost the economy, create more spaceships to bolster your forces (above) or research better weapons, spaceships and shields to give your swarm of cannon fodder a better chance of inflicting damage on the Hero™ (below). Base facilities can also be upgraded to increase the worker capacity and more importantly, the number of production slots.

© RunTime Entertainment

Once in a while, Mr Lone Space Hero™ will attempt to fire a Super Rocket in your direction which will destroy one of your base facility upgrades unless any of your spaceships successfully shoots at him or rams into him. The Super Rocket is an interesting game mechanic to prevent players from concentrating solely on advancing the tech tree while hoarding credits and resources before unleashing a swarm of highly upgraded spaceships against Mr Hero™ (below). Heroes still need a fighting chance, right?

© RunTime Entertainment

Some tips to enjoy the game (read the README.TXT for more):

• When the game starts, you have 500 unallocated workers. Assign them wisely.
• Research at least two base upgrades ASAP to increase the production slots which will then allow you to manufacture spaceships and research simultaneously
• Attempt to knock out the shields of the Hero™ before targeting his engine
• Play hotseat multiplayer where one player churns out the bad guys with the mouse as the base commander and the other player plays as the Hero™ as a traditional shoot em’ up (controls are cursor keys for movement, X for primary weapon and C for secondary weapon)

My only grouse is that the production of new spaceships would require less clicking if the production options were on a sidebar like Command & Conquer than with the current popup menu.

Download Space Aggressor (17.7 MB) from RunTime Entertainment. RunTime Entertainment also hosts an excellent review section for indie freeware games.

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