Gladiator Preview

by Charabis

Hello. My name is Charabis, and I'll be your guide on today's Search for Rare and Wonderous Creatures of the Gaming World. In today's episode, we track down the flamboyant

Gladiator. Unlike many of our other episodes, these creatures were very easy to observe. Thriving on the adoration of the crowds, these strange creatures will fight anoyone,

any time, anywhere, as long as there's someone watching them.

Our first stop was the most obvious one. With light hearts, we journeyed to the Gods and Heroes homepage where we found this brief introduction to the Gladiator

Soldiers of fortune, prisoners of war, criminals, slaves - the title of Gladiator applies to any one who steps into the arena. But only those worthy of glory survive.

Gladiators who merit such favor from the gods fight their way to the top in a spectacularly bloody and fearless fashion: no trick is too dirty, no enemy too intimidating. Like

the Soldier, Gladiators are skilled at close up combat encounters. Unlike his dutiful counterparts, however, Gladiators know no honor in a fight. Entangling and slowing

techniques, and a variety of other underhanded tactics, are frequently used by Gladiators. While this often gives them the upper hand and makes them far more deadly than the

Soldier, their lack of discipline leaves them prone to taking more damage. Because they live for glorious triumph, and losing often means certain death, Gladiators worship the

goddess of victory, Fortuna, or the father king of the the gods, Jupiter.

This initial overview only whetted our appetites for more research. These appetites led us to three additional sources of information regarding the Gladiator's combat style..

On Warcry, we found this:

The Gladiator focuses on showy moves that do a great deal of damage in hand to hand combat, but he is can’t absorb heavy damage as well as the Soldier. He also has some crowd

control abilities.

Additionally, at Gamespot we found this:

..the gladiator is the real hands-on kind of guy. He wants to get out there and kill everything in style...

Lastly, we journeyed to ActionTrip to locate a final piece of the puzzle:

Gladiators are less about disciplined fighting and more about individual style-they more specialized fighters and can use a variety of unique fighting tactics and weapons to not

only do damage to opponents, but to disable them as well. Specific styles are drawn directly from the real gladiatorial types of ancient Rome: you can specialize in net and

spear similar to the Retiarius, or fighting gloves to fight like a Pankrationist (Pankration being an ancient art combining boxing and wrestling). Additionally, the Gladiator

has some ability to heal members of his own party.

We just had to see these creatures in action! While we couldn't bring our equipment to the arena where they spent most of their time, we did find some resourceful folks who had

smuggled gear in, and were able to provide us with some video evidence of these creatures.

The first one we located at Gametrailers. After examining this footage of Gladiators in the

arena, we happened upon a rare video of Gladiators in the wilds at Google Video.

Having exhausted our sources, we returned home. We brought back all the information, and even uncovered a few forgotten snapshots from the image vaults at the main Ten Ton

Hammer site.

Be sure to join us next time when we chase down the creature known as the Soldier! In the meantime, come discuss the Gladiator and other creatures on our forums!