Abuse (video game)
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| Developer(s) | Crack dot Com |
| Publisher(s) | Electronic Arts, Red Hat, Bungie |
| Platform(s) | PC (DOS, Linux), Mac, Acorn Archimedes, Amiga |
| Release date | 1996 |
| Genre(s) | Run and gun |
| Mode(s) | Single player, Multiplayer |
| Rating(s) | ESRB: Teen (13+) ELSPA: 11+ |
| Media | CD-ROM |
| System requirements | 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) |
| Input methods | 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.
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[edit] Description
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.
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 Alien vs. Predator universe.
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] Weapons and Powerups
In 'Abuse,' the weapons that Nick Vrenna use are incapable of harming himself (even the Napalm Gun) nor environments that aren't specifically destructible (normal walls, floors, doors, switches, etc.).
[edit] Retail Version Weapons
The retail version of 'Abuse' featured seven weapons. After the first weapon, the laser rifle, six weapon icons will appear and remain at the bottom of the screen when ammunition for the respective weapon is picked up for the first time.
- Laser Rifle - The starting (and weakest) weapon in the game, this gray/red gun can fire without running out of ammunition; ammo pickups only increase the firing speed of the Laser Rifle. The range of this weapon is about 2/3 the width of the game screen. Ammunition rounds in-game appear as small horizontal gray/red boxes.
- Grenade Launcher - As the name suggests, this green rifle-type weapon fires grenades in a short, predictable parabola; this often gives the player an advantage in situations where the environment prevents the user from utilizing straight-line-of-fire weapons. The weapon's maximum horizontal range (that is, when fired at 45 degrees above horizontal) is about 1/2 the width of the screen; vertically, it is limited only by the game engine's "active zone." Ammo for the Grenade Launcher appear as bright green semicircular pods (5 rounds) or a "egg-crate" rack of pods (20 rounds).
- Rocket Launcher - A silver Bazooka-shaped launcher that fires heat-seeking projectiles; however, they are only capable of tracking Ants--regular firings cause the rockets to follow a straight line. The rounds do slightly higher damage than grenades. The range of this weapon is limited only by the game's "active zone"; a rocket can thus fly much further than the screen's dimensions. Ammo for the Rocket Launcher look like single vertical tubes with red/black marks (2-shot) or a pair of tubes in a yellow rack (10-shot).
- Napalm Gun ("Firebomb")- This is a yellow gun that shoots an erratically-arcing trail of fire; arguably the most powerful weapon in 'Abuse,' the Napalm Gun is capable of destroying dozens of normal enemies with one round, and can eliminate boss enemies much faster that with other weapons. Note that the Ant-equivalent weapon is capable of killing Nick extremely quickly, often in two shots at full health on Easy difficulty. The maximum horizontal range of this weapon is about 1/2 the width of the game screen, but a vertically-falling firebomb round can travel as far as the game's "active zone" will allow. Ammunition for the Napalm Gun come as square microchips with a yellow bulls-eye in the middle (1-shot) or linked pairs of the same chips (5 shots per pair); as expected, both types are extremely rare.
- Plasma Beam - A green-colored rifle that fires a rapidly-pulsing beam of plasma towards enemies at a range about 3 times longer than the Laser Saber (below)--that is, about the same as the Laser Rifle; in addition, damage isn't as high as the Laser Saber, but the rate of ammo consumption is also slower. Ammunition clips (20 and 50-shot) look like horizontal cylinders with white fins.
- Laser Saber - A short-length rifle that has a distinctive red teardrop-shaped head. This is a light saber-like weapon that does very high amounts of damage--only slightly less than the Napalm Gun's--allowing the player to "cut" through lines of enemies quickly; it is especially effective when used with the "Speed" powerup. Of course, it has very limited range (only about 1/6 the screen's width) along with a high rate of ammunition usage. Ammo clips (100 and 200-round versions) appear like stacks of short blue bottles with red spacers in between.
- Nova Spheres ("Death Frisbee") - This is a garnet-colored, shoulder-mounted cannon that fires ball-shaped projectiles which follow the cursor. Multiple projectiles can be launched into the air, grouped into a tight cluster by moving the cursor in small circles, and subsequently targeted upon one (or a group) of enemies. The range of this weapon is limited by the screen's width and height (due to the cursor-based targeting system). The damage rating for one ball is comparable to the rocket launcher, if not slightly more powerful.
[edit] Fan-Created Weapons
In Free Abuse ("fRaBs"), an eighth weapon was implemented:
- Death Ray - Originally in the 'Twisted Minds' fan-mod package for 'Abuse,' the dark green-colored Death Ray of 'fRaBs' is a very big shoulder-mounted cannon that fires large glowing spheres of energy. When a sphere approaches an enemy, it would generate straight tendrils of beamlets that would converge upon the target. In the game, two or three passing spheres were often enough to kill the toughest boss aliens; it could be considered second in power to the Napalm Gun, but has the advantage of greater range and a linear trajectory.
[edit] Retail Version Powerups
There are a total of six "powerups" in the retail version of 'Abuse'--five of them will give the player enhancements, of which two are only useful in multiplayer. Most powerups look like a rectangular microchip with a unique symbol in the center; the symbol denotes the sort of enhancement. The Super Health, Radar, and "No Powerup" items appear differently in-game, however. Only one powerup may be picked up and used at a time.
- Speed - A powerup that gives the user an ability to run much faster when a direction key is pressed; the chip symbol appears like a lightning bolt. Pressing and holding down the right mouse button activates the powerup (with a corresponding background heartbeat sound effect and a shadow of Nick's self projected onto the background). Nick's lower body will appear more robotic and muscular with the Speed powerup.
- Fly - The Fly powerup chip has a symbol that looks like an angled wing; picking it up will give Nick the ability to fly via jet-boots, and is activated by pressing and holding down the right mouse button. Nick's lower-body appearance will take on a streamlined look with this item.
No appearance changes to Nick occur with the other four powerups below:
- Super Health - A blue circle with a light blue star in the middle, picking up the Super Health powerup will cause the screen to flash blue briefly, and gives the player 200 health points in addition to a total health capacity of 200 points. There is no need to press or hold any button once this powerup is acquired.
- Cloaking - A powerup only useful in multiplayer (as the game's AI-controlled enemies can still track Nick without the sprite in the game), the Cloaking powerup renders the player nearly invisible, almost akin to an active camouflage-like outline. The chip symbol has an ellipse with a dot in the middle; the powerup is activated by pressing and holding down the right mouse button.
- Radar - The second multiplayer-oriented powerup, Radar allows the player to view a map of nearby competitors during a match. This powerup appears like a dark garnet-colored radar disc. It is activated by pressing the "M" key during the game.
- "No Powerup" - Actually just a means of erasing the currently-active powerup from the player for better game continuity, it is invisible during normal gameplay (but appears like a "Speed" powerup in the level editor). Picking it up causes the screen to blink briefly and subsequently the loss of the currently-used powerup.
[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] Game engine, 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 unusual 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] The "Active Zone"
To help with the high 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" (the Grenade Launcher, Rocket Launcher, Napalm Gun, and Death Ray) continue their journey far off the screen.
An interesting effect of this active zone was that high-resolution level editing (using "-size" along with the "-edit" command modifier in the Abuse game shortcut) would extend the range greatly, causing problems when testing levels which specifically depended upon a normal active zone radius.
Note: The lighting isn't activated in other resolutions higher or lower than the default resolution of the game
[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.[1] 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.
[edit] Previous storyline
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 origial involved an invasion by an alien species. 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, the same color as the weak Laser Ants, can be found. This 'Hidden Level' has a very alien construction.
[edit] External links
- Abuse at MobyGames
- Free Abuse (fRaBs) (link not working) Internet Archive backup - package of PD Abuse data.
- Abuse32 (windows port by Jeremy Scott)
- Abuse-SDL (Mac OS X/linux SDL/OpenGL port)
- some designs for Abuse 3 fan-game (JAS)
- JAS's official site
- Abuse.PlasmaFire.org - an Abuse archive site with game music recordings and a mirror of fRaBs v2.1
- Abuse for Mac OS X (link not working) Internet Archive backup
- Internet Archive Capture of one of the Abuse 3 forum threads
- Internet Archive Capture of the Abuse 3 official news page
- Internet Archive Capture of JAS's Abuse 3 progress log
[edit] References
- ^ Purchasing Abuse. web.archive.org. Retrieved on 2007-09-07.
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