Dale Weir's blog

And here it is, the final part of Extra Credits' take Western role-playing game vs Japanese role-playing games. Here they look at why the Japanese RPG has fallen behind its Western counterpart and maybe how to reverse its course.

Extra Credits returns with more on the Western role-playing game vs Japanese role-playing games debate. This time they challenge our genre classifications and dare to imply that they are a bit antiquated.

With such seemingly opposite takes on the genre, the argument usually devolves down to proponents of each genre arguing that theirs is the best example of "role-playing." Extra Credits dares to jump into the fray to see is one group is right, or perhaps if one is more right than the other or maybe even if both are wrong. Clearly it's not an easy task or it wouldn't be broken up into three parts.

The crew at Extra Credits return with the second part of their two-part series on how to become a developer.

Good old 8-Bit graphics, always there when you need to break down a complex and groundbreaking piece of dramatic work to something comprehensible.

Benny & Rafi Fine have created a Mad Men game made of YouTube videos. Though these "something-to-8-Bit" videos are usually falsely labeled as games, this time it is entirely accurate. Video the first video and then choose from three options that lead to more videos which each lead to alternate endings. It really is clever and worth taking a look even if you aren't a Mad Men fan.

Do you love spending hours in front of a computer writing code? Do you prefer spending many more hours debugging software than spending time with your loved ones? Do you want to spend time justifying your hard work to fickle gamers and an even more fickle gaming press? Then you want to be a video game developer and this video might be right for you.

Hmmm, criticizing The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim's opening for being lackluster compared to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's now (in)famous opening? Is it fair to compare two games from two seemingly disparate genres like an open-world role-playing game and a scripted, set-piece-heavy, first-person military shooter? Maybe it isn't, but it does sound like something GameCritics would do. No wonder we like this video.

More mailbag. Some of the highlights: "Is EA's Origin service a good thing?", "Which books are best for learning game design?", "How to get into game localization?" and "Should you pitch an idea to a game studio?"That last one is probably the easiest one for anyone to answer—it's always a resounding no.

The crew at Extra Credits are playing catch up to an extensive mailbag backlog. This episode runs the gamut from "How to be a Producer?" to "How to Form a Game Company" to—and this is something I have been wondering myself—"Why are even the digital-download games so expensive in Australia?"

I love that Daniel (the narrator guy) starts the video by saying that Extra Credits is a bit late on the whole SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) & PIPA (Protect IP Act) debate because it saves me the trouble of having to say it myself. That said, a lot of us (myself included) still do not know the particulars of the bills and just how close we came to one of the largest legislative cluster-you-know-whats in U.S. history.