Abuse (video game)

Last updated
Abuse
Abuse Coverart.png
Developer(s) Crack dot Com
Exakt Entertainment (iOS)
Publisher(s) MS-DOS
Mac OS
Bungie
Producer(s) Dave Taylor
Designer(s) Duong Nguyen
Programmer(s) Jonathan Clark
Artist(s) Murray McMillan
Duong Nguyen
Composer(s) Bobby Prince
Platform(s) MS-DOS, Mac OS, Archimedes, AmigaOS, AmigaOS 4, iOS, Android, Linux, OpenBSD, IBM AIX
ReleaseMS-DOS
Mac OS
  • NA: March 5, 1997
Amiga
iOS
August 13, 2009
Linux
October 11, 2011
AIX
September 26, 1996
Genre(s) Run and gun
Mode(s) Single-player, multiplayer
Vrenna using his grenade launcher on two flyers. Abuse - launch grenade on flyer.png
Vrenna using his grenade launcher on two flyers.

Abuse is a run and gun video game developed by Crack dot Com and published by Electronic Arts in North America and Origin Systems in Europe. It was released on February 29, 1996 for MS-DOS. A Mac OS port of the game was published by Bungie and released on March 5, 1997. The game's source code, along with some of the shareware content, has been in the public domain since the late 1990s and has been ported to Linux and many other platforms.

Contents

Plot

The protagonist of the game, Nick Vrenna, has been unjustly incarcerated in a prison where the staff are performing unethical medical experiments upon the inmates. A prison riot occurs and an experiment goes horribly wrong. The people inside the prison - except for Nick, who seems to be immune - are infected with a substance called Abuse that transforms them into monsters. With the water supply in danger of being infected, Nick arms himself and fights through the horde to prevent this, and then escapes from the prison complex.

Gameplay

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

Networked play, through IPX/SPX, is supported.

Development

Abuse had a very different storyline coming out of production. The update for it replaced the original introduction with the current storyline. The original involved an invasion by an alien species called "ants". [2] The player was a special ops agent, sent into their 'hive' to covertly destroy the aliens by shutting down the cooling system. This story was alluded to in a hidden section towards the end of level 14, where a large area, full of maroon tiles, can be found. [3] The game was in development for 6 months by three people with a budget of $150,000. [4]

Release

Abuse was originally released on February 29, 1996, for MS-DOS and Linux, as an incomplete shareware version by Electronic Arts in North America, and Origin Systems in Europe. The game was ported to Mac OS by Oliver Yu of Crack dot Com and published by Bungie on March 5, 1997. The port was largely reworked for Mac, with the graphics partially redone to work better in 640x480 resolution. An AIX port published by IBM on September 26, 1996, is distributed via FTP. [5]

Source code release

Approximately two years after the release of the game, Crack dot Com decided to release the game's source code. [6] Also the shareware release's game data (excluding the sound effects) was handed into the public domain.

Community development

Based on the source release the game's community worked initially on maintenance work, e.g. making the game work over TCP/IP. [7] In 2001 Abuse was adapted to SDL multimedia library, [8] with other technical refinements such as more than the 8-bit color depth the original version was limited to.

The SDL version allowed easy porting to modern platforms, for instance Microsoft Windows, Linux/X11 and also the Mac version has been updated to run on OS X. Over the years, the game became available for many more platforms, for instance BeOS, [9] Nintendo Wii via Wii homebrew, [10] OpenBSD, [11] and in 2009 AmigaOS 4. [12] The game has also been ported to the mobile devices, to iPhone/iPod Touch under the name Abuse Classic.

Until 2011 the game was maintained by Sam Hocevar on his webpage. [13] In 2014 the game was ported to SDL2 and transferred to a GitHub repository. [14]

In 2016, on the 20th birthday of the game, a community developer released a "20th anniversary source port" on base of the previous works [15] [16] which enabled custom resolutions, OpenGL rendering, and Xbox 360 controller support, and fixed the music.

Reception

Reviewing the DOS original, a Next Generation critic said the game "has everything it needs to be a great arcade classic – intuitive play control, a variety of weapons, creatures, devices, and traps ... scores of secrets to be ferreted out". He also praised the inclusion of an accessible level editor, and said the game's strongest point is the depth of its challenging puzzles, though he criticized the lack of story. He scored the game 4 out of 5 stars. [17] The game was also reviewed in Computer Gaming World . [19]

Due to its futuristic yet spooky atmosphere, Home of the Underdogs regarded Abuse as a 2D platform equivalent of the first person shooter Doom .

Abuse in its open-source version was selected in August 2011 as "HotPick" by Linux Format. [20]

Related Research Articles

id Software American video game developer

id Software LLC is an American video game developer based in Richardson, Texas. It was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simple DirectMedia Layer</span> Free software multimedia library

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform software development library designed to provide a hardware abstraction layer for computer multimedia hardware components. Software developers can use it to write high-performance computer games and other multimedia applications that can run on many operating systems such as Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows.

<i>Marathon Trilogy</i> Video game series

The Marathon Trilogy is a science fiction first-person shooter video game series from Bungie, originally released for the Classic Mac OS. The name of the series is derived from the giant interstellar colony ship that provides the main setting for the first game; the ship is constructed out of the Martian moon Deimos. The series is often regarded as a spiritual predecessor of Bungie's Halo series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UAE (emulator)</span> Computer emulator which emulates Commodore Internationals Amiga.

UAE is a computer emulator which emulates the hardware of Commodore International's Amiga range of computers. Released under the GNU General Public License, UAE is free software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyperion Entertainment</span> Belgian software development company

Hyperion Entertainment CVBA is a Belgian software company which in its early years focused in porting Windows games to Amiga OS, Linux, and Mac OS. In 2001, they accepted a contract by Amiga Incorporated to develop AmigaOS 4 and mainly discontinued their porting business to pursue this development. AmigaOS 4 runs on the AmigaOne systems, Commodore Amiga systems with a Phase5 PowerUP accelerator board, Pegasos II systems and Sam440/Sam460 systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Taylor (game programmer)</span> American video game programmer

Dave D. Taylor is an American game programmer, best known as a former id Software employee and noted for his work promoting Linux gaming.

VisualBoyAdvance is a free emulator of the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance handheld game consoles as well as of Super Game Boy and Super Game Boy 2.

<i>Mercenary</i> (video game) 3D action-adventure game

Mercenary is a 3D action-adventure game written for the Atari 8-bit family and published by Novagen Software in 1985. It was converted to the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga and Commodore 16/116/Plus/4 platforms. The game uses vector graphics renderings of vast, sparse environments and has open-ended gameplay. It was also released as Mercenary: Escape from Targ and Mercenary: A Flight Simulator Adventure.

<i>Maelstrom</i> (1992 video game) 1992 video game

Maelstrom is a multidirectional shooter developed by Andrew Welch and released as shareware in November 1992 for Mac OS. The game is an enhanced clone of Atari, Inc.'s 1979 Asteroids arcade video game with a visual style similar to the Atari Games 1987 sequel, Blasteroids. Maelstrom was released when there were few action games for the high-resolution color displays of the Macintosh, and the game attracted attention despite the dated concept. The response led Welch to start Ambrosia Software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crack dot Com</span>

Crack dot Com was a computer game development company co-founded by ex-id Software programmer Dave Taylor, and Jonathan Clark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FCEUX</span>

FCEUX is an open-source Nintendo Entertainment System and Family Computer Disk System emulator. It is a merger of various forks of FCE Ultra.

Mac gaming refers to the use of video games on Macintosh personal computers. In the 1990s, Apple computers did not attract the same level of video game development as Microsoft Windows computers due to the high popularity of Microsoft Windows and, for 3D gaming, Microsoft's DirectX technology. In recent years, the introduction of Mac OS X and support for Intel processors has eased porting of many games, including 3D games through use of OpenGL and more recently Apple's own Metal API. Virtualization technology and Boot Camp also permit the use of Windows and its games on Macintosh computers. Today, a growing number of popular games run natively on macOS, though as of early 2019, a majority still require the use of Microsoft Windows.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source video game</span> Video game whose source code is open-source software

An open-source video game, or simply an open-source game, is a video game whose source code is open-source. They are often freely distributable and sometimes cross-platform compatible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HomeBank</span>

HomeBank is a personal accounting software package that runs on OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, macOS and AmigaOS. Released under version 2 or later of the GNU General Public License, HomeBank is free software. HomeBank can be found in the software repositories of Linux distributions such as Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Gentoo Linux, Arch Linux and Ubuntu.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pingus</span> Computer game

Pingus is an open-source video game programmed by German developer Ingo Ruhnke. It is a clone of Lemmings in which the characters are penguins instead of lemmings.

Linux-based operating systems can be used for playing video games. Because many games are not natively supported for the Linux kernel, various software has been made to run Windows games, such as Wine, Cedega, and Proton, and managers such as Lutris and PlayOnLinux. The Linux gaming community has a presence on the internet with users who attempt to run games that are not officially supported on Linux.

<i>C-Dogs</i> 2023 video game

C-Dogs, the sequel to Cyberdogs, is a shoot 'em up video game where players work cooperatively during missions, and against each other in "dogfight" deathmatch mode.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GrafX2</span> Raster graphics editor

GrafX2 is a bitmap graphics editor inspired by the Amiga programs Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. It is free software and distributed under the GPL-2.0-only license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mednafen</span> Emulator for multiple systems

Mednafen, formerly known as Nintencer, is an OpenGL and SDL multi-system free software wrapper that bundles various original and third-party emulation cores into a single package, and is driven by command-line input. It is distributed under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later license. Certain emulation cores of Mednafen have been ported to RetroArch/Libretro.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PPSSPP</span> PSP emulator

PPSSPP is a free and open-source PSP emulator for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Nintendo Wii U, Nintendo Switch, BlackBerry 10, MeeGo, Pandora, Xbox Series X/S and Symbian with a focus on speed and portability. It was released to the public on November 1, 2012, licensed under the GNU GPLv2 or later. The PPSSPP project was created by Henrik Rydgård, one of the co-founders of the Dolphin emulator.

References

  1. ↑ "Abuse at a Glance". GameSpot . Archived from the original on February 5, 1997. Retrieved December 20, 2023.
  2. ↑ Nathaniel Krell. "Overview and Brief Analysis of Abuse's Plot". ABUSE @ Net-Mage.Com 1.4. Archived from the original (TXT) on 2007-11-06. Retrieved 2009-05-11. The Ants were fearless, efficient killers. The Unified Underground's only opening was that the Ant defense systems were designed by engineers too arrogant to consider the threat of an individual. It was enough to justify the covert Abuse Missions.
  3. ↑ Nathaniel Krell. "The Hive in Level 14". ABUSE @ Net-Mage.Com 1.4. Archived from the original (TXT) on 2007-11-06.
  4. ↑ Al Giovetti. "Dave Taylor of Crack dot Com's Golgotha Interview". Archived from the original on October 2, 2000. Retrieved June 7, 2022.
  5. ↑ "Index of /aix/freeSoftware/games/Abuse". September 26, 1996. Archived from the original on July 13, 2023. Retrieved July 13, 2023.
  6. ↑ "Purchasing Abuse". Archived from the original on 2003-06-10. Retrieved 2007-09-07.
  7. ↑ FreeAbuse (1990s)
  8. ↑ Abuse-SDL on labyrinth.net.au (2001)
  9. ↑ "BeOS Bible - Games" . Retrieved 2012-04-14.
  10. ↑ "Abuse Wii" . Retrieved 2012-04-14.
  11. ↑ "CVS log for ports/games/abuse/Makefile". cvsweb.openbsd.org.
  12. ↑ "Abuse ported to AmigaOS 4!". 2009-07-09. Retrieved 2009-07-11.
  13. ↑ abuse on zoy.org
  14. ↑ abuse on github.com/Xenoveritas (2014)
  15. ↑ Abuse 1996 - 20th anniversary source port on gog.com "Abuse SDL 0.9a:- Enabled custom resolutions and enabled lights on high resolutions - Re-enabled OpenGL rendering to enable vsync [...]- Added cheats via chat console: bullettime, god, giveall, flypower, sneakypower, fastpower, healthpower, nopower - XBox360 controller support with rebindable buttons "
  16. ↑ Abuse_1996 on github.com/antrad
  17. 1 2 "Abuse". Next Generation . No. 14. Imagine Media. February 1996. p. 174.
  18. ↑ Snyder, Frank (July 1996). "Abuse". Computer Game Review . Archived from the original on December 21, 1996.
  19. ↑ Shuytema, Paul C. (July 1996). "Abusive Side-Scroller" (PDF). Computer Gaming World. No. 144. p. 136.
  20. ↑ Linux Format 147, August 2011, p. 72
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.