The year is 2009, and Nick Vrenna has just been sent to a secret underground prison where horrible and illegal genetic experiments have been taking place, a la Alan Blake. Blake has just found the human gene, known as Abuse, which causes aggression and hostility. You assume the role of Vrenna, and must escape. That is the easy part. Bad news: the prisoners have turned into alien monsters, so of course, you will have to blast your way out. In the grand tradition of 2D action platformers, Abuse has it all. Everything from dark, side-scrolling prison levels filled with perplex puzzles, switches, and alien monsters, to a massive assortment of special items and weapons.
~ Michael L. House, All Game Guide
Review: Overall
Crack Dot Com's Abuse is an action packed 2D platformer where assume the role of Nick Vrenna, a one-man-army, who has escaped captivity during a prison riot. You must find Alan Blake, a mad scientist who has discovered the secret behind human aggression, and intends to use it. The people that have received the gene have turned into organic aliens. You know what you must do: kill the monsters and stop Blake.
The game takes place in the dark, secret, massive underground prison. There are many levels to tackle before you reach the command center and put an end to Blake's wrongdoing. On each level, you must find the teleporter that takes you to the next level while you face many monsters and robots. Monsters range from prisoners turned mutant, to mechanical baddies such as the Juggers and Fliers. Thankfully, you will not have to take them down with your bare hands. Abuse supplies a massive weapons arsenal to chose from, such as, the heat seeking rocket launcher, napalm rifle, and a death saber. Some weapons have no effect on certain enemies, while some shred them apart. It is up to you to discover monster weaknesses and immunities. Certain weapons can also be used to blast through walls, and special abilities, such as, anti-gravity boots, give Vrenna the ability to fly. The visuals in Abuse are adequate. The 2D sprite based graphics are very dark, eerie, and sometimes just plain scary. Good light sourcing has also been included, which helps with the DARK rooms. The sound is also well done. The ambient music makes for a scarier gameplay experience, as does the monster sounds, which can be a tad too startling and scary at times. Controlling Abuse is a dream. Used your mouse to aim your weapons and the keyboard to move or change weapons. Gameplay feels a little more realistic with this setting, and gives the player an overall better feel for the game.
Crack Dot Com has also added a few neat little features, such as map editing, and networking. With the map editor, you can create the level of your dreams, a simple process. Just click and drag the textures onto the work screen. You can also take your skills on the Internet and battle people worldwide.
Abuse is a great game. While it is a bit difficult at times, it is an amazing amount of fun that features top notch gameplay. Anyone looking for an all out slaughter fest with some puzzle solving, could not go wrong picking up a copy.
~ Michael L. House, All Game Guide
Review: Enjoyment
At times, the game may seem unbalanced due to the amazing amount of enemies. Some puzzles are vague and hard to figure out.
~ Michael L. House, All Game Guide
Review: Graphics
The 2D graphics are dark and eerie, although not very advanced, but characters and enemies are well animated, and light sourcing adds more realism.
~ Michael L. House, All Game Guide
Review: Sound
The ambient music adds an extra layer of darkness, with monster sound effects that will scare and startle.
~ Michael L. House, All Game Guide
Review: Replay Value
The game is an amazing amount of fun with multiplayer and level designer features keeping you coming back for more.
~ Michael L. House, All Game Guide
Review: Documentation
The manual is very basic, explaining items and weapons found throughout the game.
DOS version: 486DX 50 MHz (66 MHz 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)
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 - 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.
Gameplay
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.
Active zone
To help the efficiency of Abuse's engine, the code would only allow objects within a certain radius of the game window to be active during play; of course, it had to be much greater than the in-game resolution of 320 x 240. This meant that free-roaming enemies and always-on mechanical devices out of the range cannot attack the player, nor will projectiles fired from weapons that supposedly have an "infinite range" continue their journey far off the screen.
Distribution methods and later developments
The game was originally released as shareware. 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.
Abuse was also ported to Mac OS by Oliver Yu of Crack dot Com and published by Bungie Studios. The port was unusual in that it was largely reworked for Mac. Graphics were partially redone to work better in the 640x480 resolution.
The game has also been ported to the iPhone/iPod Touch under the name Abuse Classic.
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.[2] 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. An 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.
Development
Abuse had a very different storyline coming out of production. The update for it replaced the original introduction with the current "Nick Vrenna" storyline. The original involved an invasion by an alien species.[3] The player was an unnamed man, 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.
^Nathaniel Krell. "Overview and Brief Analysis of Abuse's Plot" (TXT). ABUSE @ Net-Mage.Com 1.4. http://www.net-mage.com/nkrell/abuse/abusePlots.txt. 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."
