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The simple truth is that if you spend your time at PAX waiting around in line for a demo you'll play on Xbox Live in a few months anyway, you are a chump. There are so many awesome games from smaller publishers and indies on the floor that you might not get exposed to anywhere else. So, if you were being a linefool, here's some of what you missed.

The convention's stealthy aspect kicked off with a great panel on the subject featuring Nels Anderson, Andy Schatz, and Dan Silvers, chaired by Matthew Weise, also featuring the con's largest single-room concentration of guys in suits.

I don't know about you but the side-scrolling platformer wasn't just a genre, it was the genre for most of my childhood. The games that got it right were the ones that kept ushering you forward—to the right—even when it only seemed to be getting tougher.

There is probably some life lesson or allegory in there somewhere. This video with its nice editing and great music does a good job of highlighting that.

I knew very little about XCOM before the show, but now it's one of my most anticipated titles. A re-imagining of the classic PC strategy series, Enemy Unknown gave me a very distinct Frozen Synapse vibe, which makes sense since it was itself heavily influenced by the XCOM games. There was no playable demo at the show and the presentation consisted of a pre-beta build, but I liked what I saw and will likely be picking it up when it releases.

Given the present dearth of strategy and role-playing games on the young Vita, exposure to some classic Atlus games couldn't come at a better time. I recently had a chance to play nine of these games for the first time on Vita and I came away from the experience realizing that, even if most of these games are ports of earlier releases, no one picks up on and supports unique properties the way Atlus does. This is the company that published oddball titles like Hammerin' Hero and Eggs of Steel, after all.

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.

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.