I suspect most will select the fourth option. I don't quite understand it myself.

I look at each game separately. Art style is more important to me than technical graphic rendering. In my opinion one of the best looking games of all time is Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Sega Saturn. It's art style is so good it doesn't matter to me what the limits of the engine or system are. Halo games always look good because they have such fantastic art direction and are so open and unscripted. It's amazing how good Halo games always look when you consider all the difficult things the engine is doing. The there's 2D games. Rayman Origins looks great and its not doing anything technical at all.

Graphics are important, but after performance, I think, art style is the most important part of the graphics.

Most awesome system ever for me was the DS... nuff said.

But graphics, real good graphics, are good in any system - well, except the PS1.

Graphics help, but I have never felt they are more important that control, gameplay, game content, design, etc.

I would have loved EVERY game I've played on my PS3 if their graphics were reduced and the game put on Wii. Too bad 3rd parties didn't make special Wii engines like COD did.

Depends, if a game is pretty bad it'd better have great graphics. :-p

Good graphics in general are very nice, but not everything has to look like Crysis to be good obviously.

You specified "technical graphics", which is an interesting point. It's something of a gaming pet peeve of mine when people use the term "graphics" to lump everything visually in a game. There's so many different aspects to the visuals you see when you play that shiny new video game... and while the technical aspects of the system are the tools used by game developers, in the end it's their own designs, creativity, and imagination that make the game pleasing to the eye or not.

Here's a video by the guys at Extra Credits who share my stance on the issue of graphics. They explain it much better than I can. ^_^

It is not about enjoyment it is about price. High end HD graphics deserve a regular price ($60 US) if I deem it to have quality while SD/arcade/psn level of graphics deserve a fair price of around ($15 US) if I think the same. I say it is not a must at all, great SD type games like trine 1 and 2, splosion man, castle crashers, and Lara Croft and the Guardian of light, (just to name a few) do well at an older level of graphical power. So it is by no means a must just a matter of paying the equivalent of what the developer put into it.

In terms of visuals, most of all I like my games to look clean. It's become a distraction if they aren't. Overall, good graphics are important to me, but they aren't fundamental, average visuals don't bother me, below average visuals do.

Looking like crap? 1) which game? 2) looks don't make the game, the game makes the game.