A little known gem from the days when platformers were still big on the PC,
Abuse is a dark (both literally and figuratively) platform shooter created by Crack Dot Com and published by Origin Systems, by then a division of
Electronic Arts, in 1996.
Abuse puts players in the shoes of Nick Vrenna, a man unjustly incarcerated in a maximum-security prison that is being used for
ethically-questionable experiments. Predictably, all hell breaks loose when inmates and staff get transformed into monsters by a biological agent called
Abuse. Only Nick is
immune, so he decides to take advantage of the chaos by stealing a suit of
Powered Armor and making good his escape.
The player must guide Nick through a series of increasingly difficult, sometimes maze-like levels while shooting
Mutants,
robots and
turrets with eight distinct weapons. The game was known for its convincing atmosphere and silky-smooth controls which included a unique mouse-aiming system, an unprecedented feature that earned it the moniker of "
Doom in 2D." The game shipped in a very mod-friendly state, with a fully functional map editor and a rudimentary sprite/texture editing program. The source code has been freely available since the late 90s.
It was also distributed to the
Macintosh via
Bungie Studios (
yes, that Bungie) and was a game in the Mac Action Sack. Much more recently, it received an
Amiga OS 4 port in 2009, and an iOS port titled
Abuse Classic.
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