Have you ever sucked at a game? And whatever you did, or do, you continued to suck? (Yeah, me too.) But, there’s a theory behind the madness. In a study published in The Journal of the Cerebral Cortex, it revealed that the size of your brain can actually have an affect on your gaming skills.

Scientists at the University of Illinois have studied specific parts of the Striatum, a collection of tissues deep inside your cerebral cortex, and it revealed that brain size can influence a gamers ability to “refine his or her motor skills, learn new procedures, develop useful strategies and adapt to a quickly changing environments,” or in other words, playing games.

“This is the first time that we’ve been able to take a real world task like a video game and show that the size of specific brain regions is predictive of performance and learning rates on this video game,” said Kirk Erickson, professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and the author on the study.

“Playing a game which requires very fast deployment of visual attention and motor movement could prime a strategy of speed over accuracy,” explained Nelson, “while playing a game which emphasizes a slower, more thoughtful pace could prime the opposite pattern. The main point is that different kinds of video games engage different cognitive and perceptual skills, and there are measurable differences in their effects, even in the short term.”

However, it does not work in reverse; you can’t play a bunch of video games and grow those structures in your brain — you’re stuck with the equipment you’re given from birth.

In what really is a shocking turn of events, it seems that UbiSoft has released the teaser for their upcoming, and soon to be announced game, Assassin’s Creed 2.

But, that isn’t all to this announcement, apparently the teaser is home to some many hints to the games setting and time-line. Here they are; the teaser site has some Da Vinci-esque imagery going on, which hopefully means that it’s taking place within the Da Vinci era in Italy; and there is also the mention of “Animus” within the teaser site.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? We’ll just have to wait for the next issue of Game Informer for more details.

Cyberconnect2 has worked on many games for the popular .Hack and Naruto series, but now, somehow, it seems that the developer maybe getting tired of working on .Hack and Naruto games.

Today, as I was going trough the pages of the popular Japaneses magazine Famitsu, I learned that developer Cyberconnect2 is making a new IP. And apparently the game isn’t similar to any of the other games that the developer has worked on, meaning it is not a .Hack and Naruto game.

According to the magazine, the game should be announced and released sometime in 2009. Also since the developer mostly does games for PlayStation the game has a larger chance of being on that console only.