Abuse (computer game)

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Abuse

Developer(s)	Crack dot Com
Publisher(s)	Electronic Arts, Red Hat
Release date(s)	1996
Genre(s)	Run and gun
Mode(s)	Single player, Multiplayer
Rating(s)	ESRB: Teen (13+) ELSPA: 11+
Platform(s)	PC (DOS, Linux), Mac, Acorn Archimedes, Amiga
Media	CD-ROM
System requirements	DOS version: 486DX 50MHz (66MHz recommended for network play), VESA graphics card, SoundBlaster compatible sound card, 8MB RAM, 13MB hard drive space, MS-DOS 5.0 or later (Windows 95 for IPX network support)
Input	Keyboard and Mouse

Abuse is a run and gun computer game developed by Crack dot Com, and published by Origin Systems/Electronic Arts. It was released in 1996, and runs on DOS and Linux operating systems. An improved port of the game was released for Mac OS by Bungie Studios and for the Acorn Archimedes by R-Comp Interactive. The game has been in the public domain since the late 1990s.

1 Description
2 Legacy
3 Modifications and editing
4 Distribution methods and later developments
5 External links

[edit] Description

The protagonist of the game, Nick Vrenna, has been falsely incarcerated in a prison where illegal experiments are taking place. A prison riot occurs and the experiment goes horribly wrong. The people inside the prison - except for Nick, who seems to be immune - get infected with a substance called Abuse that transforms them into monsters. Nick takes a laser gun and goes on to single-handedly destroy all mutants, stop the substance from spreading further and escape from the prison complex.

The basic premise of the game, as well as the general look of the character, enemies, locations and some weapons, is a homage to the Predator and Alien series of films.

Abuse resembles a side-scrolling platform game. The game is marked for its unusual control scheme: The keyboard is used to move Nick, while the mouse is used for aiming the weapons. The basic gameplay consists of fighting various enemies (mostly the various forms of mutants, who prefer to attack in huge swarms) and solving some simple puzzles, most involving switches.

Networked play, through IPX/SPX, is also supported. The game originally had support for TCP/IP play, but this was not present in the retail version.

[edit] Legacy

Abuse was quite well received by the game press, who hailed the game as "the Doom of platform games", the comparison being particularly easy due to the involvement of id Software contributors like Dave Taylor and Bobby Prince.

The game was not particularly popular in the world-wide market, but nevertheless, it remains a cult classic. It has, among other things, achieved a Top Dog position in Home of the Underdogs. After Crack dot Com's demise, sequel ideas were exchanged on abuse2.com (primarily set up by Crack dot Com to spread Golgotha source code), but work on an official sequel was minimal, most of it being conceptual. The team for the sequel consisted of very few of the original Abuse developers and members of the abuse2.com community.

There was a 3D "fan-sequel" being made by a few fans of the game, primarily Jeremy Scott and JAS (both contributing to Abuse 2), called Abuse 3 (Abuse 2 was announced as being "in production" before the idea for Abuse 3). It was being built upon the Quake 2 engine with added features such as shaders, dynamic shadows, and particle effects. Work continued on the game for nearly 9 months, when the project fell through due to a "conflict in the team."

[edit] Modifications and editing

Abuse took an unusual (at the time) approach to making modifications ("mods"). The game includes a rather polished level editor, which is fully usable from the game itself. The editor, once enabled with command-line parameter, can be toggled with Tab key, and the game can be fully edited while testing the level - for example, the states of various triggers can be surveyed in real-time. The game came with a complete guide to the level editor.

More advanced editing is also possible. Using a separate program called Satan Paint, new graphics can be created and added to the game. (Currently, Satan Paint is not very well supported, so separate conversion to the *.spe format may be required.)

Probably the most unique thing under the hood of the game, however, was that the game logic was programmed in a variant of Lisp. This allows for incredibly complex modifications - one of the relatively simple examples was a Breakout clone, which, however, no longer functions on the retail version. Regrettably, the Lisp interface was undocumented, and with Abuse's own Lisp code as the only reference, there were relatively few modifications that used Lisp code.

[edit] Distribution methods and later developments

The game was originally released as shareware, though in modern terms, a "beta-version demo" would be a more appropriate description. The free release was done based on incomplete game and final version was published through major software publishing house and distributed through ordinary retail channels.

The shareware versions were released for MS-DOS and Linux. Abuse was distributed with many GNU/Linux distributions at the time. Regrettably, the Lisp API in shareware releases (1.x) was not compatible with the final retail version (2.0), making modifications incompatible. The retail version was only available for MS-DOS (though the source code for 2.0 can be built to produce a Linux binary).

Abuse was also ported to Mac OS by Oliver Yu of Crack dot Com and published by Bungie Studios. The port was an unusual port in that it was largely reworked for Mac. Graphics were partially redone to work better in the 640x480 resolution. (The PC version runs in 320x200 VGA resolution, and can be made to run in higher resolutions, though the graphics will not be scaled.)

Approximately two years after the release of the game, Crack dot Com decided to release the game source code, as well as the shareware release game data (excluding the sound effects), to public domain. There has been little development based on this source release, though it did allow up-to-date GNU/Linux builds and making the game work over TCP/IP. A SDL port of the game is now available, allowing the game to run in Microsoft Windows and also in X11 systems in displays with more than 256 colors. The Mac version has been updated to run on OS X.