Abuse
AKA "that game with the horrible name" as my mom called it, a sci-fi platformer with mouse control for shooting.
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/
And example screenshots:
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/shot1.jpg
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/shot2.jpg
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/shot3.jpg
It's actually an older game, from 1996, produced by "Crack Dot Com," a short-lived group that came from iD; the game's free & open-source now - so no worries about legality. I bought it when it first came around, and it was worth the price many times over, but I think it's gone underappreciated in recent times, so I thought I'd give it a mention, seeing as anyone can play it now. I started playing again recently when I put Linux on this box of mine and saw packages for Abuse, and remembered the good times I had with it. Finished the game again this morning.
So, reasons why I like Abuse:
1. No wimping out. It delivers fast action with lots of shooting start to finish; I don't think this experience can be matched by any other game, except posssibly side/overhead shooters. And it's not monotonous either; each level is different and tops the previous one with an even more death-defying fight or escape. Except the last one, but that's cause it's just the boss monster, which is sort of lame.
2. Minimal gameplay. There is definitely a lot of strategy involved with which weapons you use, and this combined with the novelty of the different kinds of weapons makes fights interesting every time(more so towards the end when you have a full stash).
3. Moddability. I sort of thought of it as a "2d Quake" at the time, because it shared two things with Quake: An engine allowing dynamic lighting, and included features for mods, which were just starting to come into vogue at that time. The gameplay is entirely driven by a Lisp-based scripting engine, complete with a console; it included a level editor and a paint program "Satan Paint" the second of which crashed often. Netplay was supposed to be in there at release time but I think it took community efforts to actually get it working. Post-release support wasn't as great, unfortunately, because the team was apparently burned out on Abuse.
It's an excellent game, and I think it only got lost because of two things. The first one is that the new 3d games were overshadowing it at the time, so it got lost in the shuffle, and the second is that even though it has so much potential for customization, it ended up being a real pain to deal with, because all the tools were underdeveloped. The map editor forced you to pick up, put down, and align your tiles one by one to achieve a consistent look; Satan Paint, as mentioned, crashed often and really wasn't useful as more than an import tool; and Lisp has many dialects, and the version used was poorly documented(if at all? They might've just expected you to learn from their source), so coding something new was a pain too.
Quake overcame this by its own popularity; map editors, import tools, QuakeC documentation etc. came from community efforts. But Abuse never really got there. Maybe someday there'll be a remake project with a new engine using 3d models or something, but until then we can only admire the original :) Now go!!! play!!!!
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/
And example screenshots:
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/shot1.jpg
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/shot2.jpg
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/shot3.jpg
It's actually an older game, from 1996, produced by "Crack Dot Com," a short-lived group that came from iD; the game's free & open-source now - so no worries about legality. I bought it when it first came around, and it was worth the price many times over, but I think it's gone underappreciated in recent times, so I thought I'd give it a mention, seeing as anyone can play it now. I started playing again recently when I put Linux on this box of mine and saw packages for Abuse, and remembered the good times I had with it. Finished the game again this morning.
So, reasons why I like Abuse:
1. No wimping out. It delivers fast action with lots of shooting start to finish; I don't think this experience can be matched by any other game, except posssibly side/overhead shooters. And it's not monotonous either; each level is different and tops the previous one with an even more death-defying fight or escape. Except the last one, but that's cause it's just the boss monster, which is sort of lame.
2. Minimal gameplay. There is definitely a lot of strategy involved with which weapons you use, and this combined with the novelty of the different kinds of weapons makes fights interesting every time(more so towards the end when you have a full stash).
3. Moddability. I sort of thought of it as a "2d Quake" at the time, because it shared two things with Quake: An engine allowing dynamic lighting, and included features for mods, which were just starting to come into vogue at that time. The gameplay is entirely driven by a Lisp-based scripting engine, complete with a console; it included a level editor and a paint program "Satan Paint" the second of which crashed often. Netplay was supposed to be in there at release time but I think it took community efforts to actually get it working. Post-release support wasn't as great, unfortunately, because the team was apparently burned out on Abuse.
It's an excellent game, and I think it only got lost because of two things. The first one is that the new 3d games were overshadowing it at the time, so it got lost in the shuffle, and the second is that even though it has so much potential for customization, it ended up being a real pain to deal with, because all the tools were underdeveloped. The map editor forced you to pick up, put down, and align your tiles one by one to achieve a consistent look; Satan Paint, as mentioned, crashed often and really wasn't useful as more than an import tool; and Lisp has many dialects, and the version used was poorly documented(if at all? They might've just expected you to learn from their source), so coding something new was a pain too.
Quake overcame this by its own popularity; map editors, import tools, QuakeC documentation etc. came from community efforts. But Abuse never really got there. Maybe someday there'll be a remake project with a new engine using 3d models or something, but until then we can only admire the original :) Now go!!! play!!!!