Abuse

aka: Abuse Classic, Alien Abuse, Them
Moby ID: 389
Linux Specs
Included in

Description official descriptions

It is the unimaginably distant year 2009. You are Nick Vrenna, falsely locked inside a high security prison. The genetic experiments conducted in the prison, combined with a full-scale riot that took place recently, caused all guards and inmates to be transformed into insane, aggressive mutants. Your job is to escape while stopping the genetic plague from transforming the whole world.

Abuse is a side-scrolling platformer with a lot of shooting. It's a nonlinear game, as the levels often have a few exits that lead to different areas. Your character is a cyborg equipped with various weapons; initially, you only have a weak laser rifle with unlimited ammo, but you can find more powerful guns later on, such as grenade launchers, flamethrowers or lightsabers. You move through a building complex, fighting any enemies you might encounter on the way. The enemies are mostly the mutants, but also the defense systems (such as stationary missile launchers).

While you move with the keyboard, you can aim with your mouse, so you can shoot at any angle no matter what direction you are running. On your way, you'll find elevators, teleporters, cracked walls that can be destroyed and more.

Apart from ammo and health, you can also find upgrades which have a number of beneficial effect - increasing your running speed, for example.

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Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

39 People (38 developers, 1 thanks) · View all

Programming
Graphics / Artwork
Sound
Production
Co-Producer
Network Setup & Test
Additional Network testing and technical assistance
Music
Quality Assurance Controller
Project leader Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 74% (based on 24 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 80 ratings with 7 reviews)

A wonderful piece of software.

The Good
Well, for one, it's written in LISP - and I can definitely appreciate rarities. The graphics get an A-OK - detailed and well drawn (they remind me a bit of Amiga's Alien Breed) and the game engine works well and is really fast. The music/sound effects are good too, and the gameplay is fun.

The Bad
It's very repetitive, but then it's a shooter, so what do you expect?

The Bottom Line
A rare find - a very good game written in LISP.

DOS · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 1999

Let's deliver some abuse inside a prison

The Good
In the year 2009, rebel leader Nick Vrenna is captured and taken to a high-security prison where illegal military experiments have created bloodthirsty genetic mutations. All inhabitants of the prison, except Nick, become infected. A prison riot inside the complex goes horribly wrong, and, having found out that he is uninfected, Nick must escape the prison while blasting away monsters.

Those who have played Abuse consider it the Doom of platform games. Rather than just having four weapons you can use to destroy monsters, you have up to seven weapons, which is the maximum amount of weapons that you can have in Doom. Each weapon (which features classics as the shotgun, homing missiles, grenade launchers, and flamethrowers) trigger quite an explosion when they come in contact with a monster.

Abuse has a dark theme to it, therefore the game is meant to be played with the lowest gamma correction setting. You can still make out the game's scenery, and some of this scenery includes alien nests, factories, and even windows that you can look out through to view the city. This dark theme enhances the gameplay. The gray background, which you most likely see, fits the prison setting rather well.

Nick is drawn nicely. As he is running around, you can see that he actually has robot legs and he looks funny running around in these. The enemies look good and have excellent AI. Some of the monsters hang on the ceiling and wait for you to flip a switch before they make their attack. A whole bunch of them even jump out from holes in the wall. There are about twenty levels. Some only require you to get through them, while others are a puzzle, requiring you to flip a series of switches to open certain doors or to deactivate barriers.

What I like about Abuse is the built-in editor which you can use to your advantage. With the editor, you can turn on invincibility, but the main power of it is giving you the ability to customize the levels as you progress for it. The level editor is simple to use. (It took me less than ten minutes to learn it.) You can add or delete part of the backgrounds or remove certain objects from the level. If you find an obstacle that you can't get past, for example, you are free to remove it. If you want to jet yourself up to an area but can't find the appropriate power-up, then add it into the game. You can also load levels and play them if you do not want to play the game in sequence.

The music in the introduction sets the game up. This piece of music is in stereo sound, the first time that I noticed. Some notes pan from your left speaker to your right speaker, and vice versa. The sound effects in the game sound as if they come straight from Doom, with certain enemies making grunting noises when they are waiting for you, and sounds as they approach you or get killed.

The Bad
What sets Abuse apart from other platform games is that you have to use both the mouse and keyboard to shoot. You use the keyboard to move Nick and jump, and the mouse to aim upwards, fire, or put your power-up to good use. This is not the way that I play platform games, using two input devices at once. When I aim at a monster and fire, it is very likely that I lose a lot of health as a monster right beside me is giving me quite a pounding. Using two devices also wastes a lot of time.

Although there is some nice scenery in the game, the graphics get rather boring all of a sudden. No matter where you are, almost everything seems gray. There are symbols on each power-up that indicate what they do, but since there is no writing on them, I couldn't make heads or tails with these. The only way that I knew was to bring up the object list in the level editor, see what the object names are, and place them on the map.

You are required to have the MPU-401/Roland sound cards installed in your machine to hear the music in the game. Sound Blaster is not supported as a music type. So if you haven't got MPU-401, then you're out of luck.

The Bottom Line
In Abuse, you must escape a prison while you blast away monsters and flip switches in order to gain access to certain areas. The plot differs from the commercial and shareware versions of the game. I believe that this is the first platform game ever to force you to use two input devices at once, and you may find it difficult just to do this. This is the first game that Crack dot Com released, and we knew what we could expect from them in the future. It is just too bad that the company went bankrupt when they finished this game, but at least it has been released in the public domain.

DOS · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2006

Nicely atmospheric, great side-scrolling action... but not much else.

The Good
When I first started playing Abuse, it seemed SUPERB. The character animations and sounds really drew me in, and I was sincerely creeped out about the setting and mutants that leaped from shadows and ripped through walls. Movement was fluid and quick, and worked really well with the platform-style layout. The weapons, as well, were standard fare and then some, featuring my all-time favorite, laser weapons. With the addition of power-ups, it made it possible for different play tactics for different areas, something most side-scrollers don't do.

The Bad
Unfortunately, there is no storyline in Abuse. The setup is quite interesting, I expected more as I played - and found none. Eh, some people might not mind this, but level after level of the same stuff gets mighty frustrating. Especially in areas that have some gorgeous backdrop, like an indoor hydroponics forest, or skyline window, that just BEG for some in-game descriptions or interaction.

A problem with immersion, especially atmospheric emotional fear, is that repetition ruins the immersion. Unfortunately this happened to me with Abuse. After a while, I wasn't worried about what was around the next corner (well, bend in the platform) I was just annoyed. It's a shame the immersion wasn't expanded on with a story or even descriptions, because halfway through the game I just couldn't immerse myself in it anymore.

The Bottom Line
Did I, at some levels and at some moments, have fun in Abuse? Damn right. Was it a good game? Only for a little while. I'm not usually a side-scroller player, but I really loved some of the parts of Abuse. But the lack of other elements (story) and presence of others (atmosphere) made the whole a little confusing and more than a little frustrating.

DOS · by George Shannon (113) · 2000

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Trivia

Cancelled ports

In January 1996, Crack dot Com contracted Reflex Entertainment to do the SEGA Saturn and Sony PSX versions of Abuse. In May 1996, Crack learned that Sony would not allow a PSX version of Abuse because it wasn't 3D and it was a port.

Changed plot

The game's plot (shown in the opening screen) was changed at some point. Originally, the player was to take the role of a special agent infiltrating a base in order to stop an alien invasion by "the ants". The 1.x shareware version still features this back story, whereas the retail game and 2.x shareware both have the new "mutants in prison" plot. The original story's text is:

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.

On August 31, 2021, eight bytes were zeroed in a computer, and Nick Vrenna's identity was erased. A suit of armor cradling his smoking auto rifle stood in shadows appreciating the stench coming from the first retired Ant of the day. The armored soul feared the effort would end up as pathetic as the Terran Surrender Terms, but humanity had nothing else.

Copyright infringement

The iPhone version caused quite a stir when Stephane Portha released the ported game using the title Alien Abuse on March 17, 2009. The original development studio Crack dot Com released all the shareware bits of Abuse to the public domain when it went out of business, but kept ownership of the Abuse trademark, the registered levels, and Bobby Prince kept ownership of the sound effects.

Unable to come to any sort of agreement with Portha and unable to get Apple to take down the game, despite a DMCA notice, one of the original developers, Dave Taylor went out and had the game ported to have an official version of the game available using the name Abuse Classic. It was released in August 2009. Soon after, Alien Abuse was pulled, either by the original developer or by Apple.

Development

The game was largely written in C, but it also featured a Lisp interpreter. Most of the character logic and AI was written in Lisp, and it was possible to write mods simply by defining new game characters and game characteristics in Lisp code. Early shareware versions included a complete Breakout clone example game (somewhat misleadingly titled "Pong"). Regrettably, there were many changes between versions, and mods for 1.x shareware versions don't necessarily work without changes in 2.x retail version.

Macintosh version

The main improvement from the Macintosh version over DOS and Linux versions was that it had better graphics; the entire thing was worked to work perfectly in 640x480 resolution, as opposed to the VGA 320x200 used by the DOS version. (The DOS and Linux versions can be made to run on higher resolutions, but the game itself isn't scaled to those resolutions!)

Level editor

The game has a built-in level editor, and you can make levels for the shareware version. An interesting feature is that it can be made to work in sync with the actual game engine. If enabled at the command line, the editor is accessible at any part of the game which allows you to test flags and triggers in real time for your latest creation, or alternatively, modify parts of the game's included levels on the fly (ie: can't find the key for that pesky door?? Then remove it!)

Naming

We chose Abuse for our first game name because the game involved knowing full well that pressing the buttons in all those rooms was going to bring down hoards of howlers, but you would do it anyway, abusing yourself. It also went well with Crack. An alternate name considered was "Them."

References

Crack dot Com must have been Nine Inch Nails fans -- the clear namesake for protagonist Nick Vrenna is onetime NIN drummer Chris Vrenna.

Source code release

On Jul 12, 1997, Crack dot Com announced the release of the game's source code to the public domain alongside the shareware game data. Registered version levels were not released because the game was still sold at the time. Crack dot Com could also not make the game's sound effects public because they were owned by Bobby Prince.

While the code and most data assets of Abuse became public domain, the title remained a trademark held by Jonathan Clark and Dave Taylor. Using the title (e.g. to create a derivative game called Abuse 2) without licensing it from the original developers is thus not allowed.

Additional information contributed by Arson Winter, B.L. Stryker, Pseudo_Intellectual, Roger Wilco, Sciere, WWWWolf and Zovni

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Related Sites +

  • Abuse
    game page at Crack dot Com's website, preserved by the Wayback Machine
  • Abuse FAQ
    Explains much of the game. Required reading if you love Abuse.
  • Abuse abuse
    Dave Taylor's story about the iPhone version of the game
  • Abuse by Crack dot Com
    game page at the Origin/EA website, preserved by the Wayback Machine
  • Abuse for Windows/DirectX
    website of Jeremy Scott's original Windows port of the game, preserved by the Wayback Machine
  • Alien Abuse story
    Stephane Portha's side of the story regarding the iPhone version of the game
  • Craig's unofficial Abuse Website
    Wayback Machine copy of an unofficial website with user-made levels, add-ons etc.
  • abuse-game.com
    Fanpage with download of the open source release and user levels

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 389
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by emerging_lurker.

GP2X Wiz, GP2X added by 666gonzo666. Acorn 32-bit, Macintosh, BeOS, iPhone added by Kabushi. Amiga added by Игги Друге.

Additional contributors: Trixter, Sciere, Pseudo_Intellectual, Crawly, Patrick Bregger, lethal_guitar, MrFlibble.

Game added November 6, 1999. Last modified March 19, 2024.