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Duke Nukeem the one liner king "its time to kick ass and chew bubblegum...and im all outa gum"

Mine were always in regard to what I enojyed most on the systems, so my favourites are:

- Alex Kidd - Mega Man - Sonic...maybe more Knuckles cause he seemed hardcore - Hwoarang and Xiaoyu from Tekken - CLOUD STRIFE - Tombi - Leon and Claire from Resident Evil 2 - Master Chief

And current faves would be Frank West from DEAD RISISNG, Altair from Assassins Creed (I just like his costume more) and the Gears Of War COGs.

In regard to whether new VG stars are as memorable as the old, the old have an attachment of nostalgia don't they? So for us older VG'ers who played from the late 80's / early 90's our memory of old is around nostalgia where as I think these new character have a lot more development in regard to individual traits, personality and emotion. Look at the cast of Mass Effect! And HEAVY RAIN!

I think...moving forward, the new VG stars will definitely shine as well as the old, but with a different generation.

Of course, there will always be room for MARIO with everyone.

It also helps when the game the character is in is good too. Their are plenty of games that have great characters, but the game is a stinker.

Two words. Lara Croft.

The man in the orange box, Mr Freeman. Half-Life told it's story better than any other game before it and a huge part of that was it's introduction to Gordon. Your wern't just thrown in to the game to run around and slash and destory all that came across your path. Granted part of this was due to training you how use the Mark IV suit but his interactions with those he worked with showed him to be human and likable. He wasn't just a nihilistic hard-core military nutter. He has just a nerd/geek who ended up in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

Older characters will always be more memorable, though only because of nostalgia. When you look back now, they are pretty uninteresting and plain. These days, you can add a lot more depth into nearly every aspect of the character, which allows people to relate to them.

One example of this Sony's new poster boy, Nathan Drake. He's based around an every-day guy. People can relate to him, but that doesn't mean he's amazing.

For the newer generation of gamers, they will forget all the old characters, they will forget where games came from. But is it really a bad thing?

Carl Johnson from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was great - but of course the entire GTA franchise was inspired by Pac-Man, who has to be one of the greatest video game characters of all time!

Perhaps some of the issue with modern memorable characters is down to being able to customise your appearance. Many games (for example Mass Effect) allow you to customise the main character, therefore, no one can really find them memorable, as they had a different experience when they played.

Additionally, our choice of games now is so much greater. 'Back in the day' Mario was memorable, because it was the popular game and almost everyone played it as you had limited choice on what else you could play.

If there was only GTA4, Niko Belik (spelling of that?) would be highly memorable. But as it stands, you can play a similar type of game (e.g. Saints Row), or just a different game and not know him. With great game choices like Call of Duty/Modern Warfare, Bad Company, Fallout, etc etc, you don't have 90% of the market all playing one game. everyone is free to enjoy their own game, thereby killing off memorable characters across a generation.

Crash Bandicoot, Donky Kong.