Abuse is Crack dot Com's cult classic of computer games. It's a side scrolling platformer, but with a twist.
The plot: The hero, Nick Vrenna, somehow ended up into a top secret military facility fnord in which genetical tests took place. Prison riot. Test subjects got loose and the biological virus things they were developing got out of hand. Vrenna + laser gun that was lying in the corner. Do the math. =)
The mutants look sort of Gigeresque (even when they have weapons) and Nick looks fairly familiar - not to even mention his arsenal. Years before the official Aliens vs. Predator game, the fight was already possible...
Some interesting features of the game:
- Moddability: The character AI was written in Lisp (though it only contains a limited subset of Common Lisp), graphics could be changed with Satan Paint ("Why the hell it's called Satan Paint?"). It has to be said that moddability was slightly hampered by the fact that mods tended not to work across different versions of the game - well, it sort of stabilized since 2.0 is probably the last version out there...
- Easy, live level editing: The game came with a level editor that can be used while the game is running - just hit Tab and edit the level. The editing of background graphics and level structure is tile-based, and game logic is trigger-driven. The level editor UI isn't the best possible and takes some time getting used to, but it works.
- Controls: The Keyboard was Nick's feet - and The Mouse his hands. In traditional platformers, you could not point the weapon where you wanted - in Abuse that was possible.
- Multi player: Internet/LAN game built in... even before it was fashionable.
- Overkill: The game was violent and actionful enough that it could be mentioned in same sentence with DooM, in contexts other than Dave Taylor's list of accomplishments. =)
- Great graphics and sound: Abuse had good graphics and ambient sounds - though the game could only use 320x200 VGA mode and mono sound. Mac version (developed by Bungie) apparently had full 640x480 graphics. Also, Sound Blaster couldn't play the MIDI music that was added to the game. Either way, the sound effects fitted to the game more than appropriately.
The game was originally developed by Jonathan Clark in Linux (Dave Taylor's favorite OS). The shareware version was famous among Linuxists because it came with Slackware Linux. The 2.0 release was the commercial release of the game, and it was DOS only - later, a Macintosh version was released.
Some time before CdC closed down, in 1998, approximately two years after commercial Abuse release, they released the source code and shareware version data of Abuse to public domain (this didn't include sound effects, though). This was the first time 2.0 was released for Linux.
Abuse has been since been hacked a bit (for example, new maps are out there and SDL version works nicely - the old 2.0.0 code only worked in 8-bit mode in X, for example, but now Abuse runs in modern Linux desktops and Windows as well). There still are a handful of people who like the game and mod it. It is fairly regrettable that Abuse never attained anything more than a cult status, because it is a fairly interesting game concept. As a result, there modder base is rather narrow.
In Debian, Abuse is these days easily installed with just apt-get install abuse-sdl abuse-frabs.
Some Abuse web sites:
http://abuse.resourcez.com/
http://www.cs.uidaho.edu/~cass0664/fRaBs/ - fRaBs is Free Abuse, which is an easy-to-use pack of all freely available stuff for Abuse.