it's one of the few games where i legitimately have enemy placement memorized so the level design is probably pretty good

I dunno man, I think the levels are generally good but the single environment starts to grate on my after a while

I'm a simple b****. If part of the station was green or something that might've totally changed my opinion on it

I've struggled with coming up with a better way to describe good level design than "I have fun when playing it" for a few years now but I think being memorable is one of the biggest factors. I've got E1M1, Twilight Town, and The Silent Cartographer absolutely burned into my brain. In turn though there's a lot of reasons for that too, the structure of each one is good but on top of that they all have a distinct feel to them.

On that note: I love the ancient sci-fi magic found in the original Halo trilogy. There's this great feeling of discovery whenever you're digging through the Forerunner ruins that no other game has really hit for me.

I like in Halo games where winning takes a great deal of expertise that shooters like Call of Duty don't
They are competitive and firefights can go either way, whereas call of duty games are infuriating cuz firefights are short and basically luck based

In Pokemon I love nerding out about the level design and gameplay aspects, it's cool to me how an awesome boss battle can be made with all sorts of Pokemon because of the time and place where it happens and what sort of Pokemon are available to the player

I like Bethesda games because I really feel like my character and the world around me are improving or shifting based on my actions, it's great to experience changing that dangerous and painful wasteland into a thriving and hopeful land
Plus the combat system is a blast
Same with the original obsidian fallout games

I love civbuilders for sort of the same reason, watching my civilization grow and thrive is one of the best passtimes I can think of. In the space sims I love how they can generate absolutely incredible sized maps and host a hundred nations or more, and the war system is so much fun especially when you like to turtle around like me and then switch to researching op ultraships when things get hairy

I like rock band and guitar hero a lot because I get to play familiar songs and it helps me become an analytical music nerd when I see a riff that's really cool/clever/unique or something, and also it's like muh anime powerlevelness

Pikmin is a beautiful and relaxing game with some funny little thinking puzzles

Pmd has such great storytelling it's amazing

Mario games are guaranteed to be a great little romp, even though they are short they feel like masterpieces almost every time

Finally, smash is my favorite party game and a timeless series even though it's devolving into unseemly embarrassing hokeyness, they are still an absolute blast to play except for brawl which was like being stabbed to death.

One thing that's excellent about video games is seeing people go wild with the developer toolkits and find out what it's like if you move the camera until the entire world is just a tiny little island floating in a black void with a massive painted on texture of the sky and stuff haha... It's also cool noclipping into the test areas or finding weird enormous Chambers with no indication of a clear purpose. And some items and character models or scripts, dialogue, enemies and things that aren't in the actual game (or they're just normally inaccessible) can freak me the f*** out like my Spidey senses detecting that if I flipped this switch or something it would brick my Xbox, my brain, my city's power grid, my dead homies ghost, everything. Some of them just radiate energy like a demonic object would in real life... Sometimes I think that if some of them were removed, the entire games aesthetic or feel might be different, without the graphics really changing. Like flipping those hidden switches in Halo 2. Spooooky guys

Edit: perfect example, if you leave the pillar of autumn with the object cloning thing in Halo:CE, you can hop around on an invisible ground out in space and find out that the model for Halo is not much larger than a wraith tank, also it technically counts as a vehicle in the games coding, since it's counted as overturned though, nobody seems to find a way to drive it around or anything because it doesn't flip well in the chaos of the glitchy outer space part of the map. So you can flip Halo around and maybe get hit with it and die, and you can even clone the ring with the object cloning glitch, but nobody has found a way to drive it so far. I wouldn't even try this thoug,h because Halo does something in people's heads where any sort of vibe aesthetic mind raep is fifteen times stronger than it should be, and Halo REALLY wants to teach you why space (and everything else basically) is a mind raep experience.

unist is f*** raw and every single character except like one is cool in their own way

it's nice to get the s*** beaten out of you and all you can think is "damn (opponent's character) is rad"