Very good points made here, and this is why I'm a bit of a graphics whore. I personally LOVE to see what the creation capabilities of hardware rendering in real time are... i love pushing the boundaries and seeing the little things that they can start to do. That is why when HDR lighting came around it made games look SOOO much different that it was so refreshing, and why it is the new lens flare.
I think Motorstorm has that nice high res pixel look too it but it's not that overly impressive to me, technically it's okay but it doesn't feel or look right... i dunno what it is about that but it's just OKAY to me.
But there is something i'm seeing lately that I think makes games look incredible... namely take a look at Lego Star Wars on 360. I think that game looks amazing, yet the textures and the graphics are very simple (and it's a shit game) but there is some sort of blur effect on the areas of the screen that aren't in focus, I haven't seen a lot of games doing this (or maybe i'm just blind) I think GRAW2 has it too. (Wii Sports Boxing has it).
I personaly prefer the graphics in Wind Waker to Twilight Princess (infact I like that game better as a whole than TP). I LOVE cel shaded and anime stylised graphics, that's why Grandia II dispite it not being graphically MASSIVE is one of my favourite looking games EVER. Not from a technical point but from the way it looks.
It's all art style. Before recent a lot of graphics have been looking like shiney plastic which i hated, i hated that sector of that age of graphics (think Doom 3).
All a bit of ramblings, but for me it all comes down to style and art direction rather than pure technical wow... however when I see things done on hardware (like RE4 on the GCN hardware) that makes me go WOW they are pushing THAT out of the POS then that is impressive to me.
So far the only thing on the Next Gen consoles that have given me that techincal WOW they are doing that on that hardware spec is Gears of War, nothing else has caught it yet. I'm looking forward to seeing Ratchet and Clank running on PS3 cause I think that might be the next one :)
Lair -- MEH to me.
