Not to distract attention from my blog, but my friend, colleague and co-author in AI Game Programming Wisdom 4, Alex Champandard of AIGameDev has a brilliant series of articles on his site. They are technical AI reviews of major games that are written in a bulleted sort of fashion such as “21 tips from [Title] to use in your game.”

Much of the time there are links to interviews or write-ups by the AI designers themselves that Alex uses to put together his lists. Often, that is where the true meat of the entry is. The content is definitely geared towards the programmer or designer, but much of it can be digested by the game enthusiast as well. The best part is if you have actually played the games as well so you can have a peek under the hood and see what was causing it to be so engaging.

Since Blogger allows me to paste in urls automatically, I’m going to cheat and paste links to each of the articles:

• Chatting Up Façade’s AI: 23 Ideas to Talk Your Game Into
• Teaming Up with Halo’s AI: 42 Tricks to Assist Your Game
• Assaulting F.E.A.R.’s AI: 29 Tricks to Arm Your Game
• Living with The Sims’ AI: 21 Tricks to Adopt for Your Game
• What SimGolf Can Teach You about Designing the Perfect Level
• Evolving with Creatures’ AI: 15 Tricks to Mutate into Your Own Game
• Flanking Total War’s AI: 11 Tricks to Conquer for Your Game
• Sneaking Behind Thief’s AI: 14 Tricks to Steal for Your Game
• Top 10 Most Influential AI Games

Anyway, after completely immersing yourself in the AI wonderland that is AIGameDev.com, please remember to stop back by here once in a while! Alex would want it that way, too!