Just in your opinion...

What do you think makes a video game a great video game? What sort of features of the video game should it have, or shouldn't have? Why or why not?

I'm not really qualified to talk about what makes video games good (since I tend to play a lot of crap) but for me to call a game good, it would have to be something that's engaging.

If it's a single player game, it has to be interesting to the point where I don't want to stop playing. I want to find out what happens next; if I don't care, I'm not drawn into it, and if I don't care, then my attention and interest won't be there for long. I'm also a huge fan of side quests and little rewards. Get 50 kills with this weapon, and you'll unlock something new. I really like the weapon rankings in recent Call of Duty games, where if you use a gun long enough, you'll unlock attachments and what have yous. I'm a huge completionist, so this stuff is really cool to me.

In multiplayer games, I love it when I can track my stats, but I'm not interested in anything too in-depth. I like knowing how many kills and deaths I have, how many assists, headshots, accolades, and I love knowing how many kills I get with certain weapons. It gives me a good reason to try out other weapons to get my rankings for them higher.

My top three most played games (according to my Raptr page) are RuneScape with 2,799 hours tracked (probably 1000 more hours untracked) Combat Arms with 769 hours played, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 with 198 hours played. The big reason these games have insanely high hours played is because I genuinely love playing then. With RuneScape, level progression was really fun, and it was done in a way that felt rewarding to me. The drive of going for a level 99 skill was worth the grinding. In Combat Arms, the game is VERY fun to play (at least to me) and I love trying to hone my skills and increase my KDR. Modern Warfare 2 is the same pretty much, except there's more of an emphasis on unlocking everything, which is one of my favourite things about video games - unlocking things.

I love to watch things grow, and nurture them. I also like to collect items to make a good item.

I love adding stats and powering up my characters in ways that take time, but not a slow boring grind, a fun and/or action packed one.

I love collecting friends by sparing them in battle, or meeting outcasts and befriending them.

I love going back time to fix things to my liking. If I choose a wrong choice from a random chance, I'd like to go back in time and with the new knowledge and do things right.

I love to start out weak and progress to strong, to take on even stronger enemies.

And probably many other other things make a game fun for me..

I play only SP. It should have engaging gameplay. That's the first and last requirement. Good graphics and soundtrack aren't necessary but do contribute quite a bit to the overall experience too. Why am I so fixated on engaging gameplay? Because that's what makes a game, imo. A game is crap no matter how pretty it is if it doesn't have good gameplay. In my opinion.

Bar none what I look for in a game is feeling like I am apart of the game, like I feel sad when a character dies or I actually feel like that character is my friend.

I like games where the game itself lets you mold the story, and not be a completely linear path. A good example of this is the Fallout series. Each conversation with a character can end differently, whether it ends with you having more vital intel, extra money in your pocket or getting you killed.

I also like when you get attached to your character. As in, you feel like a friend of the character you play as, and that you feel as if you've grown a bond with him/her. An example of this is "Soap" MacTavish from the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series...I was kind of sad when he ended up dying in Modern Warfare 3, and that's because I developed some kind of friendship with him during the years.