Abuse

Abuse is a run and gun video game developed by Crack dot Com and published by Electronic Arts in North America and Origin Systems in Europe. It was released on February 29, 1996 for MS-DOS. A Mac OS port of the game was published by Bungie and released on March 5, 1997.

Approximately two years after the release of the game, Crack dot Com decided to release the game's source code. Also the shareware release's game data (excluding the sound effects) was handed into the public domain. In 2001 Abuse was adapted to SDL multimedia library. The SDL version allowed easy porting to modern platforms, for instance Microsoft Windows, Linux/X11 and also the Mac version has been updated to run on OS X. Over the years, the game became available for many more platforms, for instance BeOS, Nintendo Wii via Wii homebrew, OpenBSD, and in 2009 AmigaOS 4. The game has also been ported to the mobile devices, to iPhone/iPod Touch under the name Abuse Classic.

In 2014 the game was ported to SDL2 and transferred to a GitHub repository.

Gameplay
Abuse resembles a side-scrolling platform game. The keyboard is used to move Nick, while the mouse is used for aiming the weapons. The gameplay consists of fighting various enemies (mostly the various forms of mutants, who prefer to attack in huge swarms) and solving simple puzzles, usually involving switches.

Story
The protagonist of the game, Nick Vrenna, has been unjustly incarcerated in a prison where the staff are performing unethical medical experiments upon the inmates. A prison riot occurs and an experiment goes horribly wrong. The people inside the prison - except for Nick, who seems to be immune - are infected with a substance called Abuse that transforms them into monsters. With the water supply in danger of being infected, Nick arms himself and fights through the horde to prevent this, and then escapes from the prison complex.