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(With apologies to Princess Pengy.)
it all comes together into a taut gameplay loop (once you've adjusted to the era's design sensibilities) where deaths come quickly and often (just like you) but rarely feel unfair. explore the terrain, get a different gun, learn the timing windows, and you'll quite literally nab 'em with their pants down. fun, for sure, but once you adjust to the aesthetic it's not that far off from the rest of its genre.
now we fast-forward twenty years. the Dudes Rock expansion is a hit. Replaceable Parts: Sloppy Seconds has twice the rendering power and half the ideas. Ménage à Trois is an improvement, but faces both hand-wringing respectability politics and naked bigotry. the IP becomes radioactive in the public eye. the studio gets bought out, downsized, and unceremoniously dissolved.
but throughout all this, the playerbase of the first game grows up. they have some important personal realizations. they learn game design and computer science. they grow tired of modern trends in gaming and queer discourse. they dust off a game that gave them funny feelings once upon a time.
I missed the boat on the game's first heyday, and went into this not knowing much about the modding scene beyond "it exists and gets weird.” my first few minutes were unassuming enough; beyond some modern loading-screen quotes and quality-of-life tweaks, it felt pretty faithful to its 2000s origins.
then I got recruited as a guard for a local warlord. then I had to help cook the warlord’s books to dodge onerous tribute payments to her patron. then we invited a rival warlord for a feast and killed her at the dessert course. I hadn't fired more than a dozen shots in an hour.
see, through a combination of mods and byzantine social norms, the remaining servers are more akin to mmo roleplay groups or baffling gmod games than arena-shooter matches. the game I joined was technically capture-the-flag, but I think it was rigged to be unwinnable - from what I gathered, the game only "ends" once a month or so as a sort of debt jubilee.
the server I joined took care to welcome me as a newbie, and we shared plenty of online-queer-nerd reference points, but it was still clear that there were twenty years of inside jokes and drama and patch notes that I just wasn't there for. the player counts seem stable, though, so the community must be either good at onboarding or remarkably devoted.
but even if I'm an outsider and unlikely to change that, I'm happy just knowing that the fandom exists. how malleable should a game's rules be? how much can social norms enable or restrain our worst impulses? what are the limits of cultural reclamation? I don't know, but I'm glad we pulled these questions from the corpse of such a rancid little game.
I know this is an odd case, since replaceable parts was a hyped-up mainstream game once upon a time. but while the franchise has sputtered out, unable to chart culture-war riptides, the original game has been Ship of Theseus’d into something worthy of this blog.
if you haven’t had the pleasure, replaceable parts is a team shooter in which naked trans avatars eat and fuck each others’ corpses to heal and level up. if this sounds like edgy controversy-bait, it’s not not that, but for a game from 200X it handles this all surprisingly well. the characters are nude in the same way that ancient statues are nude; their chalk-white skin with neon hair and guts evokes both the austerity of pop-culture antiquity and the tacky-ass truth. it's mechanically relevant, too - you have no storage space by default and must scrounge for every belt and bandolier.
the cannibalism and necrophilia get the same consideration. There are always tense tradeoffs - how long can I immobilize myself? can I afford the refractory cooldown? how much should I press my luck in the thrusting minigame? when's the right time to teamkill?it all comes together into a taut gameplay loop (once you've adjusted to the era's design sensibilities) where deaths come quickly and often (just like you) but rarely feel unfair. explore the terrain, get a different gun, learn the timing windows, and you'll quite literally nab 'em with their pants down. fun, for sure, but once you adjust to the aesthetic it's not that far off from the rest of its genre.
now we fast-forward twenty years. the Dudes Rock expansion is a hit. Replaceable Parts: Sloppy Seconds has twice the rendering power and half the ideas. Ménage à Trois is an improvement, but faces both hand-wringing respectability politics and naked bigotry. the IP becomes radioactive in the public eye. the studio gets bought out, downsized, and unceremoniously dissolved.
but throughout all this, the playerbase of the first game grows up. they have some important personal realizations. they learn game design and computer science. they grow tired of modern trends in gaming and queer discourse. they dust off a game that gave them funny feelings once upon a time.
I missed the boat on the game's first heyday, and went into this not knowing much about the modding scene beyond "it exists and gets weird.” my first few minutes were unassuming enough; beyond some modern loading-screen quotes and quality-of-life tweaks, it felt pretty faithful to its 2000s origins.
then I got recruited as a guard for a local warlord. then I had to help cook the warlord’s books to dodge onerous tribute payments to her patron. then we invited a rival warlord for a feast and killed her at the dessert course. I hadn't fired more than a dozen shots in an hour.
see, through a combination of mods and byzantine social norms, the remaining servers are more akin to mmo roleplay groups or baffling gmod games than arena-shooter matches. the game I joined was technically capture-the-flag, but I think it was rigged to be unwinnable - from what I gathered, the game only "ends" once a month or so as a sort of debt jubilee.
the server I joined took care to welcome me as a newbie, and we shared plenty of online-queer-nerd reference points, but it was still clear that there were twenty years of inside jokes and drama and patch notes that I just wasn't there for. the player counts seem stable, though, so the community must be either good at onboarding or remarkably devoted.
but even if I'm an outsider and unlikely to change that, I'm happy just knowing that the fandom exists. how malleable should a game's rules be? how much can social norms enable or restrain our worst impulses? what are the limits of cultural reclamation? I don't know, but I'm glad we pulled these questions from the corpse of such a rancid little game.
