I have worked in the game industry for over 10 years, and have also taught classes in game design and programming. This is the first book that I would recommend as intro/intermediate textbook for game AI. It covers all the popular game types (shooters, fighters, sports, and more) and covers all the popular AI methods (state machines, scripting, messaging, many others).
The book uses a very clean, not-too formal, not-too conversational writing style, which is easy to get into and yet remains professional sounding. The included code is clean, usable, and is very representative of real working game code. There's also tons of code snippets from actual released games to show the reader how the concepts have been done out in the wild.
The book also goes into the actual process of creating an AI system for a game project. Only by knowing the type of game you're going to make, the platform, the audience, and a slurry of other factors can you intelligently design a system that will provide your project with everything it needs to succeed.
All in all, a great piece of work from an industry vet.
Also, another review states that "the book fails because it's OpenGL based," which is hilarious in its ignorance and outright falsehood. The reviewer states that "all major gaming houses use DirectX" which is strange, cosidering that the vast majority of all video games are actually not PC based (which is the platform that mostly uses DirectX; Sony and Nintendo obviously are not using Microsoft's libraries, even the XBox uses a very specialized version of DirectX). Plus the fact that the author actually WORKS at Sony, and you can see that the reviewer doesn't really have any clue. The book is about Game AI, and the small bit of OpenGL code in the book is just allowing a quick, cross platform "renderer" for the AI demos. This is not a book on game graphics, and never says that it is.
