I recently picked Gladius for the PS2 for $6, and long story short, I got a little obsessed with it. It basically became another part time job. I logged about 90 hours on it (saved game time, not counting restarts) in the course of a month.

It's a turn based strategic combat game, in which you're a gladiator managing a school. You recruit different types of warriors (light, medium, heavy, support, animal, and arcane), equip them and run them through battles at various arenas throughout the world. It's not a fighting game really, accuracy in combat is determined by swing meters not unlike those in golf games.

Overall, I thought the game was a lot of fun. There's a lot of beancounting and micromanaging of the gladiators in the school (down to what they wear), and while that may not sound like a lot of fun, to my particular set of dysfunctions it's a perfect match.

The only down side is the end of the game. Gladius should be taught in schools as how not to end a video game. Once you got into the final championship it leaves the arena and becomes about saving the world. I'm not adverse to raising the stakes, but once you go into the final 5 or 10 battles you start levelling your characters pretty fast and once you complete the game it's over, the credit roll and you can't go back to arena battles. Why on earth am I picking abilities and skills at every level for characters that I am never playing again?

I ended up loading my last save point before the championship and now I just roam around redoing old battles or seeking out random wilderness encounters.

I started to play it once upon a time, and then just never got back around to it. I didn't let myself get back around to it, I should say, because I could see right away how addictive such a micro-management game was getting to me.

I seriously played it for about two days (but about 20 hours), and then made myself quit cold turkey.

I was turned off by the game pretty early on. I started playing it, and I got my ass handed to me in the first battle. So I lick my wounds, start reading the tutorials again, start over, try to come up with a better game plan. Play the battle again. And I was doing good, feeling better about myself, when one of the combatants turns into a fucking BEAR and then just obliterates my team. I said "Fuck that" and never picked it back up.

Ah yes, the people that turn into bears. I had one on my team for awhile, but ended up firing her when I got an acutal bear. I never used her ranged attacks and the bear didn't have to give up a turn to turn into a bear.

There's actually a number of things that irk me about the game. At higher levels there is a sword called "The Executioner" that has a chance to auto-kill on a critical hit. Since hits run off the power meter, most attacks you can pretty much call your crits. The weapons are pretty rare (although by the end of the game I had three, two found in play and one found in a shop), except that once you get to a certain level, pretty much everyone you meet has one. (And most of these, because of the way random drops work-- only in certain areas-- you won't get as loot.)

Only certain classes can use them, but if two or three guys in a battle have them (not an unusual occurance at high levels in battles that involve those classes), that pretty much means some of your characters are going to get dropped in one hit, no matter how many HP they have. This can be extremely frustrating.