Remember back when Surfer Girl predicted that Far Cry 2 (PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360) would become the best shooter of 2008? Well, judging from what's streaming - nay, outright overflowing! - from Ubisoft's Ubidays event, there will probably be no first person shooter videogame title like it. EVER. Hands on demonstrations, interviews with dev leads, and trailers all outline pretty ambitious new features. Get those that captivated audiences, updated with a new video, at the full story.

Stuff Magazine is currently running a rumor stating that the much-loved Artificial Intelligence roBOt or AIBO is being resurrected by Sony and is making it compatible with the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable.

t was also mentioned that the domesticated robot dog will interact in the virtual environment much like it used to do in the real world. More details and the magazine scan after the jump!

Turok's (Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360) lead level designer Josh Bridge showcased Propaganda Games' upcoming game and its realistic visuals coupled with believable AI. Dinosaurs, blood, and the video await at the full article!

SportsGamer.com had a chance to interview Jody Kelsey, producer for Sony's MLB Franchise. He talks about the improvements and basically what players can expect from this new installment.

They have made improvements in just about every aspect of the game since they had something better to work with - the PS3's processing power and larger memory. Graphics, animation, gameplay, and artificial intelligence were among the things that were improved.

Players would have the option of being "always online". They can access live data like scores of their fave teams, items, IM, Buddy invites, and game challenges. According to Mr. Kelsey, their "biggest feature this year, by far, is the Online League system". Online play is the front runner of this game, they are even working on a feature that involves the system sending text messages to the player. Players can enjoy head-to-head exhibition games and scheduled league games.

Click Full Article to find out what else to expect from the game.

It's been so long since we last heard anything from EA about its 2007 title, Army of Two, so we're pretty happy that this new video has just popped up, letting everyone know just what EA's been working on.

Dubbed as a "co-op third-person shooter", this game is unique because it can be played either on co-op mode with a second player, or alone but with the PAI or Partner Artificial Intelligence on board. Either way, the characters Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem will be working with each other at all times. The focus and challenge of the game would be to complete missions and assignments that are given to the pair using proper coordination.

As seen in this video, hovercrafts will have to be driven with one person at the wheel and another on the machine gun, an injured partner will have to be dragged away from the line of fire, and cover could be created by flipping over large objects with  your partner's help.

At the moment, details of this game's story are still vague, though it has been known that Rios and Salem are hired men who were meant to supplement government military forces.

So will business be as good for this game, as the narrator in this video predicts? We'll find out, come 2007, when the game is finally released on the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

Download: [Army of Two "Security and Strat" video]

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." We're not too sure if he was a Splinter Cell fan, but from the looks of it, he was.

AI developer SpirOps just announced that the enemy AI in Splinter Cell: Double Agent will be running on their latest-generation Artificial Intelligence programming.

The AI will be running on SpirOps' "Drive Oriented" technology, which allows the virtual character they're programmed into to independently learn from their surrounding environment and the player's behaviors to better their own battlefield survivability - much like how a real soldier adapts.

“Bots had to be a realistic alternative to human players. We needed an AI solution that could handle various human behaviors while letting us keep control over the game. SpirOps AI, thanks to its Drive Oriented layer approach, totally fit this need.” said Olivier Saillant, Lead Programmer for Ubisoft’s Annecy Studio.

The AI will be used in the game's multiplayer mode, and will be the first time that bots are to be placed in a Splinter Cell game. Axel Buendia, SpirOps CEO:“Artificial Intelligence is one of the major steps forward in next generation gaming and together, SpirOps AI and Ubisoft are bringing life to games.”

Somewhere out there, Hideo Kojima-san is probably reading this, and googling SpirOps' web site....

Artificial Intelligence in any program connotes the ability to make decisions from partial information. Many believers agree that graphics don't count as much as AI anymore and one of them is Sony Computer Entertainment's (SCE) UK boss, Ray Maguire, who lets out a quip on how powerful the PS3's CELL processor is.

"The CELL chip is so powerful it can do 256 million calculations per second...That means one thing for us in the videogames industry: artificial intelligence."

True enough, in games like chess and poker, this revelation is apparent, but we're a bit wary of this, since video games are so difficult to program that building an impressive AI system seems to take the backseat as compared to making drop-dead gorgeous graphics.

However, Maguire says to forget the graphics as the future of video games depend on convincing and competent AI, something that the PS3's GPU can handle. Advancements in this field have been continually progressing, and the ultimate goal is to be able to program game AI that can act like humans, as well as develop gameplays that are as intuitive as human-populated games could be.

A point of interest would be the question of how long reaching this goal will take, as Jonathan Schaeffer, head of the University of Alberta's Computer Science Department have once told us that AI can be a real guesswork. Still, if fantastic graphics no longer pose much of a challenge to programmers and designers, then the next field to turn to is already obvious.

For the character Lady Lara Croft, what is the main difference between the game version and Angelina Jolie's portrayal? Most will say graphics. But Big Boss Ray Maguire of the Sony Computer Entertainment UK sees deeper than that. He sees human intellect, he sees raw human emotion.

Such is his example as he tries to give emphasis on AI in an event held in the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) headquarters. Determined to give full commitment to the videogame medium, the Academy conducts events and talks like this every now and then.

Maguire lamented, "We are no longer interested in graphics per se, because graphics chips can do that for us. But the central processors of all the new games machines are about making games more compelling by adding in artificial intelligence." He believes it's high time focus on improvements shift to AI as improving graphics has always been the main concern since the 90s.

To get his point across, Maguire showed off a concept video that depicts a rendered woman character auditioning for a movie role. His audience witnessed the character go through a complex array of emotions as she talks about love, shock and murder. It will not be far, he concluded, before this kind of emotion will be possible in game characters.

With all the hooplah over next gen graphics, physics, high definition signals, network services and controller innovation, one element seems to have been largely overlooked by many, an aspect that for me  will truly herald the coming of the next generation... intelligent artificial intelligence.

Developers would argue, and with good reason that character A.I has come an awfully long way since the days of Quake and Doom, and in some respects it has, but the end result is still largely the same - the enemies pop out, we shoot at them, they duck/hide behind some cover, wash, rinse, repeat. We've occasionally heard devs talking about their enemies using true squad AI to flank you, force you out in the open, surround you and basically perform all sorts of dastardly clever military tactics. To this day the only game that's really come close to delivering on this promise is F.E.A.R. (on the PC).

The truth is that current generation A.I is tremendously simple, rigid and predictable. Consider that the most lasting impression made by a game is how the player experiences and interacts with the world (profound, I know). For the most part game worlds have been painfully static, and only recently have we truly begun to breathe life into them with detail and physical simulations. It's time we started doing the same to the characters that inhabit these worlds as well, if we can see real intelligence and genuine malice behind the face of the bad guy who kidnapped our gal, we're more likely to invest in the game, if we understand and respect a defenseless enemy soldier we're more likely to feel the pang of guilt that comes with shooting him.

This thinking doesn't just apply to first person shooters, but all genres across the board, if I play a team at soccer, I want to feel like each individual player has his own tendencies, idiosyncrasies and strengths, not just the hive mind mentality we're currently seeing. If I play an RPG I want to invest in the characters emotionally because of who they are and how they react to situations spontaneously, not prescripted events. If I'm playing Splinter Cell I want to feel bad for having killed that innocent because I killed an innocent, not because you'll terminate my mission. And how awesome would be to play multiplayer Lumines against HAL 9000!?

For the most part we've been playing through worlds populated by puppets on strings, and worse, we hold those strings, maybe with the second and third generation of next gen games we'll start to see all that horsepower put to good use. What say you guys, are you satisfied with where are right now, or would you like to see more?