Which ones have the alien intro and which ones have the prison intro?

The alien plot was replaced with the genetic experiments plot in the version published by ORIGIN/EA. Aliens are mentioned in versions up to 1.10. Version 0.33 does not have any opening crawl.

So? No one have any rare versions of the game?

What I forgot to mention in the first post is that DOS v1.0 can be found on several magazine cover CDs in unpacked form:
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.php?n=36 … osgames$2FAbuse
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.php?n=30 … 1&f=$2FProg0105
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.php?n=15 … $2FDema$2FAbuse [wrong date stamps]

This version already has the Pong demo add-on.

All versions prior to v2.00 are capable of running both the game and the built-in editor in high resolutions:

The high-res mode is restricted to editor only in the full game, as it obviously affects gameplay by making a greater portion of the level visible to the player. However, there's also a double pixels high-res mode:

It doesn't use the correct aspect ratio but it's still a nice feature. To enable this mode, the game needs to be launched with the following parameters:

1-2 -size 640 480

On another note, here's a fan site preserved by the Wayback Machine which has some user-made levels and add-ons for the game (among other things):
http://games.3dreview.com/abuse/index.html

Some of the levels are compatible with the shareware version. Crack dot Com actually encouraged the players to create and distribute levels for the shareware version and to submit them for evaluation and possible publication at Crack dot Com.

I used to play it on my N800 often - that was a Linux version of some sort.

BTW, abuse2.com had an unofficial port of the v2.00 demo to Linux: linux_abuse_v2.tgz

A Mac demo is available here. It's still the four-level version (unlike the EA/ORIGIN DOS demo which only has three levels plus the tutorial).

Does anyone know when the registered version 1.0 (the one available directly from Crack dot Com) was released? The date stamp on the shareware executable v1.0 is from Sep 16, 1995, but I'm not sure if the shareware version numbers coincide with the registered releases.

UPD: This message suggests that the registered Linux version was available since Oct 1995.

DOS shareware v1.01 was found recently in zipped form among new CDs submitted to Hallfiry's collection:
http://kultcds.com/Catalog/index.php?n=-2&ext … ax=2359948&o=da

Download: ABUSE101.ZIP

I really liked this game 😉
There was once a release by who-knows-who for iOS.

heh, I have a boxed copy that I bought back when the game was new, some 1x version on CDROM IIRC

I've long wondered, what's the definitive version of this game?

this game appears to be the defacto way to benchmark an operating system ability to support video games. It's the Lenna of video games.

No, that honor goes to Doom.

What about Tetris? Doom has ports on a lot of systems, but Tetris has clones on EVERY system.

Tetris such like Abuse used 2d tile to render the view. Doom use kind of 3d that somewhat work at places. Doom have not that honor, on my 60" screen at 320x200 it look confusing at best. Stuff like SnowBerry doom was juste awesome.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I've long wondered, what's the definitive version of this game?

I think there's the initial CD release of the game which still uses the alien invasion/occupation plot. It sure is quite a cliche, but it's makes a lot more sense than the prison scenario that replaced the earlier story in the EA version.

I'm not sure if the original registered version included music? Shareware v1.05 still does not have it, and it seems to me that it was released after the CD version (not sure). There's also the issue that none of the versions seem to record your settings for sound/music volume.

What I love about this game is that from the first shareware releases, the developers included the level editor and allowed the users to freely distribute custom levels for the shareware version. There was even a level design contest, with the possibility of user-made levels making it into the full game (I'm not sure if this ever happened though). There exist several levels which were made for the very first DOS shareware version (v0.33), some are available here.

Of course, when the publishing rights went to EA, the disabled the editor in their demo version, and also removed one of the shareware levels to make it shorter. The demo is still capable of loading custom levels and mods though.

Abuse also allows for some very extensive modding, as exemplified by the Pong demo game which was included with shareware v1.01 and v1.05. A while ago I found a website of Steven Chan a.k.a. Sprite, who had released some add-on levels for the game, and also apparently created mods, as shown on his page:

I started my game-developing passion around June/July 1996, when I tinkered around in Crack dot Com's game Abuse, which I bought […]
Show full quote

I started my game-developing passion around June/July 1996, when I tinkered around in Crack dot Com's game Abuse, which I bought because there weren't any better platform games at that time. I was peeping around in the directories, when I hit something called "Lisp" files. (Lisp, in this case, is a programming language that actually means List something something ... Maybe processing?) I made my very first game, it was called "Shootout". I made it under IRQ Design. Then I went on and created oh-so-crappy (but NOT crappy for me at the time) games in Abuse like Bash, Deviator, and ... uh... something else. More and more I wished it could be advanced, because Abuse was nice, had lighting effects, but was limited in necessary things.

abuse is free and you can write apt-get install abuse to have it up and alive on your system.

no abuse-frabs on debian sarge, I've try the .deb, change the source.list to etch, there is no way I can get my wife to get an orgasm, I mean, to have abuse on debian sarge!

I just read at Lord Soth's that Crack dot Com had released a preview screenshot pack with 10 images in PCX format. The file name was ABUSEPC2.ZIP.

I haven't managed to track it down yet but Google Groups has an archived message from Dave Taylor dated 17 June 1995 which mentions these:

1Screen Shots :
2
3        sshot1.pcx   800x600  - an example of what the game looks like in hi-rez
4                               (very nice!)  will probably require a pentium to
5                                  play hi-rez at a decent frame-rate.
6        sshot2.pcx   320x200  - an action scene, not so pretty.. (don't use :)).
7         sshot3.pcx   640x480  - development tools and 18 zillion windows.
8                                  This level editor comes free with the game..
9                                                        players can make their own levels.
10        sshot4.pcx   320x200  - a scene with lighting and aliens.
11        sshot5.pcx   640x480  - what sshot4.pcx will look like on a console machine
12        sshot6.pcx   320x200  - a akiniod-like game that runs using the same engine,
13                                this 270 line program was written in a day.
14                                (try running the game : abuse -lsf pong/pong.lsp)
15                                look at pong.lsp to see how simple this is.
16        sshot7.pcx   320x200  - nice action shot with decent lighting
17        sshot8.pcx   320x200  - just added this, color calibration makes sure you
18                                see perfect graphics even on bad monitors.
19        sshot9.pcx   640x480  - screen shot from the free paint program we are releasing
20                                 which can be used to edit game artwork.
21        sshot10.pcx  320x200  - shot showing gun rotations

MrFlibble wrote:

I think there's the initial CD release of the game which still uses the alien invasion/occupation plot. It sure is quite a clich […]
Show full quote

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I've long wondered, what's the definitive version of this game?

I think there's the initial CD release of the game which still uses the alien invasion/occupation plot. It sure is quite a cliche, but it's makes a lot more sense than the prison scenario that replaced the earlier story in the EA version.

I'm not sure if the original registered version included music? Shareware v1.05 still does not have it, and it seems to me that it was released after the CD version (not sure). There's also the issue that none of the versions seem to record your settings for sound/music volume.

What I love about this game is that from the first shareware releases, the developers included the level editor and allowed the users to freely distribute custom levels for the shareware version. There was even a level design contest, with the possibility of user-made levels making it into the full game (I'm not sure if this ever happened though). There exist several levels which were made for the very first DOS shareware version (v0.33), some are available here.

Of course, when the publishing rights went to EA, the disabled the editor in their demo version, and also removed one of the shareware levels to make it shorter. The demo is still capable of loading custom levels and mods though.

Abuse also allows for some very extensive modding, as exemplified by the Pong demo game which was included with shareware v1.01 and v1.05. A while ago I found a website of Steven Chan a.k.a. Sprite, who had released some add-on levels for the game, and also apparently created mods, as shown on his page:

I started my game-developing passion around June/July 1996, when I tinkered around in Crack dot Com's game Abuse, which I bought […]
Show full quote

I started my game-developing passion around June/July 1996, when I tinkered around in Crack dot Com's game Abuse, which I bought because there weren't any better platform games at that time. I was peeping around in the directories, when I hit something called "Lisp" files. (Lisp, in this case, is a programming language that actually means List something something ... Maybe processing?) I made my very first game, it was called "Shootout". I made it under IRQ Design. Then I went on and created oh-so-crappy (but NOT crappy for me at the time) games in Abuse like Bash, Deviator, and ... uh... something else. More and more I wished it could be advanced, because Abuse was nice, had lighting effects, but was limited in necessary things.

OK, but what's the best version from a pure gameplay perspective?

MrFlibble wrote:

I'm not sure if the original registered version included music? Shareware v1.05 still does not have it, and it seems to me that it was released after the CD version (not sure). There's also the issue that none of the versions seem to record your settings for sound/music volume.

I played this a lot with my brother back in '96 - '97, and we both remember never getting the music to work. But I remember TRYING to get it to work and being very frustrated with it, so it must not have been clear to the user/player that there wasn't any, if indeed there wasn't. I've just been assuming that we just didn't have a compatible enough system for it to play the music... I hadn't ever considered that the version of the game we had just didn't have music.

Recently, I acquired a CD-ROM copy of the EA release via eBay, and it does have music. Pretty good music, actually. And the funny thing is that it has the Roland LAPC-I as one of the options...which is equivalent to the MIF-IPC-A + MPU-401 + MT-32...so incredibly, there's this awesome game from 1996 that outputs MT-32 compatible music! Might be the last game to support it, or one of the last.

(Yes, I'm aware I'm responding to an old post. 😉)