T w e n t y S i d e d
Shamus Says:
A recap comic. Everyone – fans and Shawn alike – faulted me for doing too many of these. They don’t advance the story, they just rephrase it.
They’re probably right, but I remain unrepentant.
Shawn Says:
On the one hand, this comic is largely unnecessary. On the other hand, there are a few amusing bits. I’m also once again reminded that I wish I had done the fantasy segments in a sketchier style. I think it would have worked well. Ah well.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
I think it’s a testament to the authors’ commitment to the premise that I don’t immediately find Steve the most unlikeable character in the group :)
That recap is perfect. There’s just something so very…Marcus about the way it conveys all the basic information in such a stupid, unhelpful way.
It’s very true to my experiences with RP groups, too.
The recap helped me. I haven’t gone back and read the rest of this strip and don’t know if I plan on doing so. And it was a funny little recap.
Side Note: I usually find stories about what the party was doing before I joined to be boring. I know its sounds selfish and honestly partly it is, like I care more if my character is involved. But its also more interesting if I was there to get the full context of what happened as it happened. If I was there rolling dice, experiencing the tension.
Now that’s a good clip episode! You can taste the salt emanating from the GM whose entire plot nobody cares about!
Just because it’s not necessary doesn’t mean it’s not funny.
I think it’s not _just_ recap; there’s humor in seeing how badly the players have garbled their understanding (or, at least to some extent, Casey has garbled their understanding) of the plot.
I lean towards the players in this comic. The plot established by Casey is extremely simple, and the players screwing around so much is the cause for their own confusion. DMotR is more aligned with the DM making things way too complicated and/or forgetting crucial information.
I think recaps are important in a webcomic. When the reader spends only a couple of minutes per week with the comic, and storylines can stretch over months, a recap is good way to remind the reader of the main events. Especially because the highlights of a comic like this are the jokes, not the plot points
From the other perspective, that of the binge reader, a recap is just one extra strip, and doesn’t distract much from the flow of the story.
The only downside with that, especially for a strip that updates irregularly is that it can be frustrating to have that single update in a month or week be a recap of things the audience already knows.