Hard question. 2nd gen had some nice looking games but 3rd gen started with beauty. 5th gen in the 3d world was hideous but I still love it. Damn most saturn games looked bad. When 6th gen started with the dreamcast 3d got much more beautiful. Alot of people saying gamecube. Have yall never played ps2 or dreamcast? Lots of beauties.

I bought the 3 PS2 GTA games for the PS4 last Christmas, and had MASSIVE trouble playing GTA 3 off the hop. I eventually got used to it, and mostly really enjoyed it, even getting the platinum. But initially? Whoo boy. I think PS1/Saturn/N64 era is the hardest for me to look at graphically. SNES and Genesis graphics are more appealing to me in retrospect.

-edit. I voted wrong. Picked PS2 era instead of NES

GTA 3 was always awful to play on PS2 ;) 15fps really isn't a good way to play a game...

6th gen looks really impressive when I look back on it, but even NES graphics are still pretty good to see

I tend to go into 2nd/3rd/4th/whatever gen games with a 2nd/3rd/4th/whatever mindset, so my standards adjust accordingly. I confess I have never actually played a first generation system like Pong, but I've played plenty of Atari 2600 and haven't had a problem with the visuals. I also still regularly play SNES, PS1, and N64 without issue. (Excluding instances of poor framerate, but that's still a problem in a lot of current gen games)

What interests me is that 17 people have voted that they find anything below current gen unacceptable. Being hampered in your ability to enjoy the countless great games made prior to 2012 sounds like a terrible burden to me.

Some of my favourite 2nd gen games are Space Invaders, Asteroids, Breakout, Pitfall, and River Raid.

Yes. The frame rate and motion blur were my 2 biggest issues.

The motion blur can be turned off in options. Can't remember if it sped up the frame rate or not. 

I am well done with it. Before I moved on to Wolfenstein, I took a sentimental tour around the 3 boroughs, knowing I would never see them again in my life. True story. That is nice info to have nevetheless. Perhaps it will help me with Vice City and/or San Andreas.

Sprites were good in 2D, but in 3D they could be good in some cases and bad in others: as I wrote in a previous post, they were awful in Lands of Lore III, as they were hastily made as an emergency solution to finish the game when they ran out of funds, OTOH they were well made, amusing and coherent with the wacky and over-the-top humour and style of the game in Duke Nukem 3D.

This is true form 3rd and 4th gens on, previously HW limits were very tight, and games could concede very little to graphics, they were pure gameplay and the best graphics could do was to be functional to it and possibly reach elegance in essentiality (yes this partially makes you right also for the first two gens, but it's also true that such tight HW constraints heavily limited the range of art styles that could be successful).