With E3 having started today, we have been inundated with information about new consoles, new games, and new hardware, but before we get into the meat of the console discussion, let's talk about EA's press conference. Universally reviled as they may be, today they pulled some pretty good moves, including the announcement of a new Star Wars Battlefront game, after many long years of waiting. It will be powered by Frostbite 3 and in the trailer that was shown, you can see an AT-AT storming the battlefields of Hoth.
 
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To continue a series that we started many a moon ago, but abandoned due to extraneous commitments, the staff here at Games Cave would like to extend a hearty apology along with the release of this iteration in the What it Does series. Unfortunately, due to an increasingly demanding series of commitments, we have not been able to pay as much attention to the site as we would like. But now we would like to change that for the better, and to do that, we are going to try to talk about how the characters that a game has can affect the game, both positively and negatively, in both their writing and design.

The last time we looked at a gameplay mechanic, we talked about dialogue and how very important it is to the immersion that a player feels while interacting with a game and characters. But no matter how well written the dialogue is, without a good cast of characters to delver those lines, they will still fall flat and fail to bring the player into the game. And the most common failing that a studio encounters when putting a character into a game is that they rely too heavily on stereotypes without acknowledging this fact.

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By now, every so-called "Hardcore Gamer" knows where the modern video game came from. Everything we know was spawned from the cultural phenomenon known as Dungeons and Dragons. It introduced us to the concept of the modern role-playing game. It gave us the idea of a persistent character and dungeon crawling epics. From there, the video game scene exploded. CRPGs flourished until the advent of the video arcades, which popularized the quarter crunching games of the eighties and nineties.

But looking at a modern game, it might be hard to see the influence of these early games. But if you dig deeper, you can find these mechanics that have lasted generations. But if you were to look at a game like Left 4 Dead, it might be a little bit harder to find these influences. But deep down, the ember of these ideas still smolders on.

For those of you who somehow have not heard of the phenomenon that is known as Left 4 Dead, it isn't exactly the most plot driven game. Instead it is a nonstop fest of bullets and bodies as you try and fight off the hordes of the undead trying to feast upon the avatar of your character.

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At the end of this first year of  running this website, I thought that it would be only fitting to give you guys who read something big. Usually at this time of the year, every site comes out with their potential game of the year lists, and while we will be doing that as well, and by the time you read this, both the list of nominees and the winners will be available to you so that you may find out what we loved best about this year in gaming. But to celebrate this day (you don't have a one year anniversary very ofter. In fact it usually only happens once if you are doing things right) with a little bit more of an oomph, we decided that we should go one step further and give you a list of My Top 100 Games of all time.

This isn't exactly an original idea when it comes to video games writing, as most major sites have a list like this somewhere buried in their archives. And as we like to conform to what is normal, we decided to join their ranks. But this isn't the only reason that I am writing this. I think that by looking through this list of game, these 100 titles that I have played over the past eighteen years of my life, you can see many things about me and how I was influenced as a gamer and more importantly as a writer. It is the biography of my life, only in the form of games that I have played and I hope that in reading it, you gain a little insight into the man behind the mask.

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One of the most highly debated and hotly defended topics in the video game world is not between consoles or franchises, but if video games have earned the distinction of "art". On both sides of the divide are ardent attackers and defenders; each convinced that the other is wrong, and neither willing to hear anything else about it.

I am not professing to have the final word in this debate; rather, this is my own take on the debate, not a justification of one side's argument over the others. I will try to come at this issue impartially, despite my inherent bias for one side of the debate. Nevertheless, let us just put that aside, and dig into this question a little bit.

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