ETTiNGRiNDER's Abuse pages

Here is a page dedicated to the sidescrolling action game Abuse by Crack Dot Com. Abuse was particularly noted in its day for the mouse & keyboard control scheme it pioneered, where the player's character was moved using the keys but could freely aim and shoot all over the screen using a mouse cursor. This is a style that's still sometimes seen today such as in the indie game Butcher.

Beyond its control scheme, though, it seems sadly forgotten by most that Abuse was a pretty cool game all around; it captured the zeitgeist of games like Doom and Quake and transferred them into a 2D game with an arsenal of various weapons, tons of enemies stalking the gloomy sci-fi halls, powerups allowing the player to sprint at super speeds or fly, and devious levels full of traps and walls that could be exploded to reveal secret passages. The game is also moddable, with a built-in level editor as well as Lisp-style scripting that allowed all sorts of reworkings of the gameplay to be done.

There are two different versions of the Abuse storyline. Earlier releases had a generic "attack the alien planet" plot where Nick Vrenna is outfitted with a suit of power armor and dropped off on a suicide mission. The later, presumably more official version of the story is that Nick is an escaped prisoner in a facility whose research has gone terribly wrong and mutated the people inside into violent monsters, and Nick must prevent the contamination from spreading to the outside world. Both versions used the same set of graphics and levels, however, and involve destroying lots of "Ants" who look suspiciously like Xenomorphs.