Multiplayer on One Keyboard 4: Gladiator

By: Jordan Magnuson

On: March 25th, 2008

Gladiator is a brilliant Action/RPG hybrid playable by up to four players on one keyboard. Yeah, the graphics are “old” (whatever that means). Yeah you’re going to need an attention span longer than the average casual gamer to get your team set up. So what. Period.

In my opinion this game is one of the best and most classic multiplayer on one keyboard games you will ever play. The game was originally released by Forgotten Sages for DOS in 1992, but has since been ported to your twenty-first century operating system courtesy of Snowstorm Entertainment. Check out the game and see why it has an average rating of 9 out of 10 at HOTU.

Download and more info at Snowstorm. Man, you don’t even have to pay for this!

Posted in Action, Freeware, Highly Recommended, Linux, RPG, Windows | Tags: ForgottenSages

http://0xdeadc0de.org Eclipse

i have it on my gp2x (it’s a porting of this version) and it’s fun also alone
Mr. Small

Yo where da online play at?
http://www.g4g.it FireSword

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/original/1085531549-00.png

xD
AmnEn

Is there any way to reconfigure the controls? Let’s just say Notebook without a Numpad makes playing a little bit tedious.
Jamey

Oh my god, I used to play this nonstop with my best friend back in the early 90s! I was always a mage, and he was a barbarian. Go figure. It was actually the first small game from a relatively unknown developer I ever bought. So worth it.

This is awesome. I’m excited to give this another play when I get home from work. I can already hear the sound effects of clashing shields, clerics healing everybody, mages warping around the map.
MercuryBlind

This game was amazing. Now that it has joystick support its gonna amazing to play multiplayer. I can’t wait to see what they do with it.
http://www.g4g.it FireSword

http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/knights-of-the-round/screenshots

xD

p.s delete my previous post. image don ‘t show
Sigh

Like Jamey, I spent countless hours on this game with friends back in high school. We probably played through it five or six times, and did many shorter games as well.

Three things always struck me as interesting about it:

First, the game is fantastic as a multiplayer gauntlet type game but horrible as a single-player real-time tactical / Gauntlet hybrid. There’s all this framework in place for you to recruit and command and army, but it’s neither easy nor fun to actually play the game that way.

Second, I’m slightly curious how Jamey played with a mage / barbarian combo because in our experience you needed one player to be a cleric and arguably another to be a druid (to create “tree forts” on levels with superpowerful enemies you need to be able to retreat from). The proble, though, is that once the cleric gets the raise dead ability, the game breaks — the cleric raises dead at his own level (more or less) and gets experience for raising them and for their kills (which produces more dead enemies to raise). As a result, the cleric suddenly gets all the XP, shoots way past the other characters in levels, and is then raising skeletons stronger than his party members.

Third, as a result, the first part of the game is the most fun. It remains (and is this lame?) a treasured childhood memory.

A couple bits of trivia. Many members of the team, if I recall correctly, went on to get jobs at Blizzard (before Blizzard was really huge). Because only four keys and two modifiers can be read at once, three players on one keyboard led to frequent fisticuffs over key jamming.

:)
Mr. Small

But yo, where the netplay at?
Jamey

Well you can switch between all your teammates during play, which is how we would heal and everything, but we would designate one specific character to each of us that we would use pretty much all of the experience points on before each mission to make insanely strong fighters. So by the end, it would really just be our two beefed up and broken players, with a few extras such as clerics, fighting hordes of elementals and whatnot.
Jamey

Also, I wish they finished Plux… I used to play a game like that way back in the day and thought Plux would be a revolution in gaming.
Spam

Ahh, yes. Such a great game. Used to play this with friends for hours.
http://my.opera.com/I%20plus/blog/ Gio/Wiidark

Seems like an interesting game,too bad nobody bothered making a net compatible version so that I may play with or against others online. I can’t really play the game with others since almost everyone I know is like always at work. Same thing with Chaos Funk, if that game were online computable, i would have been playing it more often.
Mr. Small

These many peoples on one keyboards games really need netplay.
http://my.opera.com/Iplus/blog/ Gio/Wiidark

True dat, in a world where people work more often, family and friends separated by miles. Games like these should be updated to allow net play.
Quetzocotol

MAAAN I used to have the demo of this game, it was so much fun! Thanks for posting it, can’t wait to check it out again after so long.
Hyudra

Wow. Old memories. I remember playing this with my buddy, cramped on a single keyboard, me as a rogue, him as a cleric, letting the slimes multiply & then killing them en masse.
Jordan

Good times :)
Greywolf

Ah, my cousin and I used to play this game for hours, maxing out our character’s stats until the game got ridiculously easy. Some combos we tried:

Cleric + Elemental (best combo by far)
Cleric + Thief
Cleric + Soldier
Cleric + whatever
Slime + Slime (try it, you’ll be surprised)
Mage + Elf (mages are hard to play)

Good times. Mostly, it boils down to one person playing a cleric and another picking a fighter-type, and investing all your money in them, but it’s so much fun anyway.