Indeed...........there was so much detail..............so much..........................textures >_>

Unless you've got to play Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay first, which I was overally much more impressed with - not to mention it's much better game as well.

It was impressive at the time but its aged badly. I thought they way overused/overcooked spectacular maps and the low res textures and normal maps didn't help. Character models were quite low poly too.

In the same year (2004) Half Life 2 released and tbh it still looks quite serviceable today.

Thats true, the shadows were state of the art back than. Still looks great today.

The monitors/displays stood out for me. Fully operational, real screens instead of just a texture.
The flashlight was also really well done, although people just complained you couldn't attach it to the gun.

The Flashlight was very well implemented, looked great for the time and it made the game actually look dark. However unfortunately swapping the Flashlight to Gun to Gun to Flashlight ruined the flow of the game. Though i never complained back on release, i complained when revisiting it, thinking to myself that why not just have a attachment to the gun or helmet, after all it was the future and didn't make much sense that hand held torches would be the only source of light for a future marine. Anyway i am just rambling.

They are games which were on the technical cutting edge, which meant graphically they were ahead of their time as other games took time to catch up.

Your argument is based entirely on art and personal taste, not the technical merits... In that case I could assert that Super Mario World on the SNES is superior to Uncharted.

The Playstation 3 was constantly "talked up" due to the "power of the cell". It still couldn't beat a PC however.

The modelling does have a plastic-like presentation to it, but having so many stencil shadows back on a Geforce FX/Radeon 9700 was pretty impressive back in the day... And I would argue that those stencil shadows have held up pretty well considering all the other effects games used back then like... Bloom. Ugh.

I'm going to toss in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.

It's a game that kinda looked "behind the times" when compared to Donkey Kong Country. Fast forward a couple of years and we really appreciated what they were doing. The SFX chip was doing so many things that we took for granted. Even the GBA couldn't accurately replicate some of the things this game had going on--and that was seven years later!

Yeah the bloom era lol. Feels like we're heading that way with raytracing. Where almost every game which has RT reflections HAS to have super reflective puddles in them to show off the tech. Once devs figure it out and use it subtly and more realistically, its going to enhance game experience quite a bit for visuals for future games.

Wind Waker.