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Friday, October 5, 2012

This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

October 5th, 2012Top Story

This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5thThis week we ditched our clutter for a digital life, kept screens from destroying our eyes, created a perfectly organized resume, and more. Here's a look back.

This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

Top 10 ways to Ditch Your Clutter and Digitally Organize Your Life

We've all got a few cabinets, drawers, and shelves filled with clutter that seems outdated: CDs, paper, photo albums, DVDs, and books take up a lot of space. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

Five Best Budget Pens

Those of us who love our pens know that they can be more than just a writing instrument that we toss out and replace with a new one-they can be great tools that help us work and feel more creative. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

Swap Desktops with Each Other with Our Reader Wallpaper Pack 6.0

Some of the best wallpapers we find come from you. You're finding awesome stuff on the web or making it yourself. These wallpapers don't always fit into a category, and so the reader wallpaper pack was created. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

Dirty Dishes, Speaker Stands, and Gmail in Outlook

Readers offer their best tips for making sure the dishes get washed, getting your speakers at the right angle, and using Gmail in Microsoft Outlook.
Don't like the gallery layout? More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

Keep Computer and Smartphone Screens from Destroying Your Eyes

Staring at a screen all day can cause eye strain and other vision problems. Keep your eyes healthy and prevent other issues like neck and shoulder pain by practicing good "eye-gonomics."
The Vision Council has published a helpful 16-page guide to avoiding digital eye strain. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

I'm Felicia Day, and This Is How I Work

Felicia Day got her start in Hollywood as an actress, appearing in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and more. Today, Felicia has emerged as a leader in the world of online video production. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

Crack the Hidden Pawn Shop Price Codes to Haggle a Better Price

Haggling is part of the pawn shop experience, but the seller always has a leg up on you because they know exactly how much they paid for an item. However, according to Redditt user beefjerkybandit, at least one pawn shop chain, Pawn America, has an easy to decipher code that they put on every item. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

Roll Your Own Perfectly-Organized Printable Online Resume in Five Minutes

Building and designing your resume takes a lot of time and effort whether you're considering design or not. To help you out, we put together a resume script that's as simple as filling out a form. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

How to Avoid Awkward Conversations when Meeting Someone New

Meeting people for the first time can be uncomfortable, especially when the conversation isn't flowing. Making small talk can work temporarily, but you'll probably end up in awkward silence. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

The Best Things to Buy in October

It may be the beginning of fall, but holiday deals have already started, which means you can grab all sorts of deals during the month of October. Here are the best things to buy this month. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

How to Know When It's Time to Quit

You're thinking of jumping ship. Maybe it's your job, a relationship, a degree, or some other commitment that's both so hard to keep doing and so hard to leave. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

How to Stand Out in an Interview

You've just landed a job interview for a position you really want. Congratulations! Now, you know you only get one chance to impress, but how exactly do you do that? More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 29th to October 5th

Browser Speed Tests, Mac Edition: Chrome 22, Firefox 15, Safari 6, and Opera 12.02

Now that Mountain Lion's out with a shiny new version of Safari 6, we thought it time to revisit our browser speed tests. As always, we're pitting the four most popular browsers-this time, on a Mac-against one another in a battle of startup speed, tab loading prowess, and lots more. More »


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What Looper Teaches Us About How to Do Genre Right

October 5th, 2012Top Story

What Looper Teaches Us About How to Do Genre Right

By Charlie Jane Anders

What Looper Teaches Us About How to Do Genre RightNow that Looper is officially a sleeper hit, there's been a lot of speculation that this could be the start of an era of smart genre movies. (We heard similar talk after Moon and District 9.) But it's definitely true that every time a smart genre film does well, it opens the door a little wider.

And you can learn a lot from Looper about how to do genre storytelling right — here are some lessons we gleaned. We already talked in our review about the ways that Looper handles genre tropes especially well — but here are a few specific lessons.

Top image: Martin Ansin/Mondo

1) Use your widget sparingly

In tons of interviews before Looper came out, writer/director Rian Johnson kept saying that this wasn't a film about time travel — Looper uses time travel to set up the story, similar to Terminator. Except, of course, that the whole second half of the film depends on time travel to set up Bruce Willis' motivations. (Not unlike how Terminator depends on time travel to set up everything the T-800 and Kyle Reese do.) But what Johnson really meant was, time travel isn't used gratuitously in the film — it's not a widget that's pulled out over and over again, or used as a "get out of fail free" card.

2) The genre elements are what make life difficult for people

We sort of touched on this in our review, so apologies if this point seems repetitive. But one way to think about genres of storytelling is that they're what get people into trouble — people in a spy story are in trouble because of spy shit, people in a thriller are in trouble because they're being stalked by a slasher. Any time the characters get too comfortable or happy, the genre elements pop up again to make their lives hell all over again. That's definitely how Looper uses its genre elements — Joe's life would basically be okay, if he didn't have to deal with this "escaped future self" crap. By contrast, bad storytelling treats the genre elements as a set of points that have to be hit, or audience expectations that have to be met. If you're doing a time travel scene, there has to be a scene where ________ happens — because that's part of the genre. And that's one way that you end up with crappy stories.

3) Character matters

It's worth contrasting Looper with — picking more or less at random — Battleship. Both movies feature a main character who starts out as selfish and then grows over the course of the film. It's a common trajectory for movie protagonists, but obviously a lot depends on execution. In Looper, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character makes a number of choices over the course of the film, and the time-travel premise is just one way we learn more about him. Everything in the story is set up to illuminate Joe's interior life or to provide more context for the decisions he makes. In Battleship, meanwhile, Taylor Kitsch's character seems to be a one-dimensional loser until the film suddenly needs him to become someone different. The plot devices are just sort of a backdrop, or maybe Kitsch's character arc is just window dressing for the plot.

4) Don't be afraid to reclaim clichés

Looper is full of time travel clichés (including one that I grumbled about earlier this week.) Just when you think Looper has exhausted all of the classic time-travel story ideas at its disposal, the second half of the film is built around a doozy. But the movie never acts embarrassed to be bringing back some of the most overused time travel ideas. Nobody ever wisecracks about how this is just like some other time travel story. The movie never tries too hard to put its own spin on an idea that's been done before — except where the story actually does go in a different direction. The movie seems to assume that either you're not steeped in time travel lore, or you're enough of a fan that you don't mind seeing some plot devices you've seen before. Either way, the lack of apology or fancy dancing to get around the use of common tropes is one reason why, paradoxically, Looper feels fresh. By committing to the tropes with zero irony, you can make them feel new again.

5) Stories can be provocative without being political

Is there a political message in Looper? If so, I can't find one, except maybe "criminals are bad and poverty is unpleasant." Or maybe "violence begets violence" — but that's hardly a political statement, per se. The film's dystopian near future looks nasty, but it's not a future that's blamed on any particular thing. It's just a nasty future. Contrast that with both Moon and District 9, which shared a similar sort of metaphor about evil corporations and what it means when someone else owns your body. The lack of an overt political message in Looper hardly detracts from its poignancy or depth — if anything, the sadism and weirdness sink in more, because you're not processing a political message at the same time. (Not that we don't love some polemical, political dystopias.)

What do you think? What lessons from Looper do you wish other genre storytellers would take on board? Or what do you wish Looper had handled better?

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It's Time For Japanese Developers To Stop Hoarding Their RPGs

October 5th, 2012Top Story

It's Time For Japanese Developers To Stop Hoarding Their RPGs

By Jason Schreier

It's Time For Japanese Developers To Stop Hoarding Their RPGsWhen I think about all the role-playing games released in Japan that never make their way to U.S. shores, I like to picture a snarling dragon sitting atop a pile of game cartridges, spitting fire at anyone who comes within breathing distance.

Hey Japan. Time to stop hoarding your gold.

This is not a new phenomenon, of course. American RPG fans will undoubtedly remember all the games we missed in the 90s: Terranigma, Final Fantasy V, Live A Live, and many more. But it's a little nutty that this localization barrier still exists today. If you don't speak Japanese, there's no way to legally play games like Valkyria Chronicles 3, Suikoden PSP, and of course, the infamous Mother 3.

It's too bad. When a Japanese developer announces a new game, my first reaction is not "Awesome!" but "Shit, we're never going to get that, are we?" When Atlus announced yesterday that dungeon crawler Etrian Odyssey IV is coming here next year, I was more relieved than anything. It had been way too long. I was starting to worry.

If you're wondering why Japanese game publishers and developers have been so reluctant to localize their RPGs, the answer is easy. They think it's too much of a risk. They look at games that have failed to take off in the U.S.—RPGs like Brave Story and Half-Minute Hero and quite a few others—and decide it's not worth the time, money, and shame involved in localizing their games for an audience that doesn't seem to want them.

But here's the thing: we do still want JRPGs. There are still plenty of fans who are happy to spend money on great, high-quality games. Don't believe me? Let's look at two big examples.

It's Time For Japanese Developers To Stop Hoarding Their RPGs

A few weeks ago, when I interviewed Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime about Wii U, I managed to sneak in a couple of questions about Xenoblade, one of the Wii's biggest RPGs. Released in Japan during 2010, then in Europe a year later, Xenoblade was not confirmed for U.S. localization until December 2011, months after many diehard fans had already imported or pirated it.

So what took so long?

"We needed to make sure that there was really an opportunity for it," Fils-Aime said. "We wanted to see how it would sell in Europe, and based on the performance in Europe, we would look to bring it here to the U.S. It did well in Europe; we decided to bring it in here. We took a very smart approach and we sold it ourselves online in terms of physical goods as well as a focus on GameStop as a retailer, and it was a very good effort for us."

"How'd it sell?" I asked.

"Quite well," he said.

I had already gone over my allotted interview time, so I didn't get a chance to prod him for more numbers, but that "quite well" could mean just about anything, depending on Nintendo's expectations. Could mean 200,000 copies sold; could mean 20,000. (Probably closer to the latter.)

The important takeaway here is that gamers were willing to dish out money for a high-quality, critically-acclaimed JRPG. Didn't matter that it was in standard definition. Didn't matter that a ton of its prospective audience had already bought the European version. RPG fans were hungry for good games, and they proved it with their wallets.

It's Time For Japanese Developers To Stop Hoarding Their RPGs

And what of The Last Story, that other big JRPG that came out for the Wii this year? I asked publisher XSEED's Jessica Chavez (who you may remember from her excellent Kotaku Q&A a couple of months ago) how it performed.

"The Last Story has definitely gotten the support of the fans," she told me. "It's doing really well, and we hope word of the game's quality/sexy packaging will continue to entice more to check it out."

Again, no specifics, but my point still stands: U.S. gamers are willing to spend their money on excellent Japanese role-playing games, but with many of them, we're not even getting the chance. Granted, publishers like XSEED, Aksys, Level-5, and Atlus are doing a commendable job of localizing and releasing their Japanese games in the United States. It's the bigger guys—the Squares, the Konamis, the Segas—who need to stop hoarding and mistreating their RPGs.

While chatting with Nintendo's Fils-Aime, I also asked about the next RPG from Monolith Soft, the one they're making for Wii U. Should we expect that same Xenoblade rollercoaster ride all over again?

Reggie Fils-Aime: "The way we look at the opportunity is, given a level of marketing support, how much are we gonna sell and is it gonna be a profitable venture?"

"We know that they're working on a game," he said. "I personally haven't seen it, but I know there's a lot of excitement in Japan and Kyoto about what they're working on, so I look forward to seeing it. In the end, if it's a game that we decide to publish from... what would be a second-party standpoint, certainly we'd love to bring it here to the US.

"The way we look at the opportunity is, given a level of marketing support, how much are we gonna sell and is it gonna be a profitable venture?"

Fair enough. Presumably that's why Square Enix hasn't released Final Fantasy Type-0 in the U.S. yet; they know the Final Fantasy brand could move copies, but the PSP is dead, and not a lot of people are buying Vitas. Maybe they're waiting to see how a classic role-playing game like Bravely Default: Flying Fairy will do in Japan before they commit to bringing it here. Maybe they think nobody here will care about Slime MoriMori Dragon Quest 3.

That's all well and good. I don't expect any gaming company to operate in a way that won't make it money. But there's an audience for great Japanese RPGs, and the success of games like Xenoblade and The Last Story prove that. Sure, RPGs not named Final Fantasy might not move more than forty or fifty thousand copies without some sort of marketing budget, but a game can still be profitable on that scale. Look at the success of XSEED, of Aksys, of Monkeypaw Games.

And hey, even if a publisher doesn't make money off the Western release of a given game, sometimes building up fan loyalty can be just as beneficial. By localizing a niche RPG—like, say, Mother 3—a company like Nintendo could have turned a cadre of angry fans into some of its biggest supporters. We feel connections to the guys like Atlus and XSEED not only because they talk to us like human beings, but because they rarely hold games back. This summer, Atlus released two niche RPGs on the dying PSP—Gungnir and Growlanser Wayfarer of Time. Both games flew straight under most peoples' radars, but the hardcore Growlanser fans will never stop appreciating Atlus for giving them the opportunity to play that game.

It's depressing that localization has become such a big issue for RPG fans. Fifteen years ago, I never could have imagined that I'd miss out on so many RPGs just because I don't speak Japanese. So listen up, you lovely publishers. We're here, we want to play good games, and we're willing to give you money for them. We just need a chance.

Random Encounters is a weekly column dedicated to all things JRPG. It runs every Friday at 3pm ET.

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