Free Games
Abuse

Note: Since this review was written R-Comp Interactive have released a full commercial version of this game

Lee Noar has ported and released a free Acorn version of the PC platform game Abuse, thanks to the original software house, Crack Dot Com, releasing the source code into the public domain. And he's made an excellent job of it too, even including a proper desktop frontend to the game.

The full download is 1777K in size, but if you fancy playing a scrolling platform shoot'em'up game, controlled by a combination of keyboard for movement and mouse for aiming and firing, then for free you can't really do better than this! It requires a Risc PC and runs reasonably well on ARM610 or 710 machines, but it really comes into its own on a StrongARM. It's not a world-beating game, but it's not too bad, and has such little niceties as parallax scrolling. There's nothing very original about it, and there's a lack of variety, but when you don't have to pay a thing for it you can hardly grumble!

You can choose to play the game in either an 8-bit colour or 24-bit colour mode, and alternative level files are available on the internet. You will need a copy of the free X-Files long filename filing system to play the game, however, but this is freely available on the internet. In addition, the game takes up about 8Mb of disc space, and you'll need to have the Acorn Toolbox modules installed.

The game even comes with an editor, so you can design your own levels. Impressive stuff!

Links
Lee Noar's web pages - RISC OS Abuse web site, with latest versions for download
X-Files - required to play Abuse
Crack Dot Com - including alternative level files

...this page last updated: 17/8/98...
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