Abuse has been a fun one to try to do some background research on. Typing in the name of any of the developers, designers and engineers for Abuse + the word “abuse” into a search engine has provided insight into just how much molestation is going on in our country. Typing their names in, along with the word “crack” wasn’t any better. You are on your own with this one. What was Abuse?
Abuse is most easily described as a run and gun game, although there is a lot more falling and “descent” to it than I remember from something like Rush’n Attack or Metal Slug. I think this is a genre that became more approachable with gamepads shifting into dual thumb sticks. Cuphead is a recent run n’ gun game and — 2017? It’s 8 years old, now? Christ, what am I doing with my life, how are the days passing so quickly when viewed through the lens of shooting cartoon monstrosities from left to right.
Back to Abuse. You are Nick Vrenna – falsely imprisoned in a prison where experiments upon the inmates have turned them all into grotesque ant creatures. Nick is immune to the drug/disease (“Abuse,” as per the title, and it is not totally clear to me if it’s a drug or virus) and quickly acquires weapons like grenade and rocket launchers which allow him to destroy the infected. The victims are intent on killing him. I don’t deny that the close quarters of prison living probably leads to fantasies about shooting the other inmates. My closest experience to that was apartment living, and yeah, I get it. Hell, I’d probably be one of the bugs. Having not finished every level of Abuse myself, I checked a “Let’s Play” to see if killing the same people that Nick was forced to live with was brought up in the ending, but it isn’t. I was hoping that the congratulatory end scroll when Nick escapes the prison had someone suggesting some light therapy for having to kill thousands of his fellow prisoners, all revealed to have been mutated into slavering insects, with Nick showing a bit of surprise that they had been transmogrified.
One of the best ways to have your game live forever is to have it be good and to release the source code, and we have seen Abuse ported to many different systems. It’s a game that not only shows up on projects like eXoDOS (of course) but with many free gaming front ends – I most recently saw it and was reminded of it on Portmaster! And it’s on Github here, too. It’s everywhere for everything. Flatpack has it for the Steam Deck, you can’t miss it.
There is one last piece I want to talk about, which is the save system. It does not have save anywhere, but being an arcade-style game at heart, it doesn’t really need it. I like the save system as depicted to the left. I like being able to click on a square from 1 to 16 and save my game. When you restore a game, it shows you what save games you have set and the date (although not the year, so it’s not perfect) with a screenshot that kind of also shows what you were doing. That’s great. So many times I have to come up with some kind of name when saving progress in other games, and it’s just ROBB01 or foobar2 littered everywhere because when I am done playing I don’t feel like describing the action.
Abuse is one of the first things I put on a system when I am doing the “scene setting” thing, which is to install the emulators and go find Abuse and make sure it works there. It is pretty much the perfect game and makes me wish we got more from Crack Dot Com instead of, and again, perhaps my searches are not perfect, tons and tons of prosecuted crime.