All earlier games on PS1 qualify, They were the best for it's time because game graphic hadn't reached this level of fidelity yet.

By this i can guess you were born in the 21st century.

1984 

Gen 5 aged very badly, but honestly not even as a child I found they beautiful and always thought 4th gen looked way better. The same goes for 3rd gen, always find them ugly and strange 

So I'd say 6th gen. PS2 games looked amazing for me when I was a kid, but nowadays not as much. Good thing is very easy to remaster them with better textures and lighting, Wind Waker comes to mind, it's so beautiful on Wii U that really looked like a new game 

4th gen still surprisingly cute

Everything from prior to gen 7 that isn't pixel art or cell shaded, and most of gen 7 for those sensitive to resolution and scaled back grass.

/thread

Nah. It's an indie style now.

Nah. A lot of Dreamcast games clean up nicely with HDMI and look very sharp and crisp but then again DC. I say DC specifically as it had its own look. Soul Cal, Power Stone look great in HD. A lot of Model 3 games ported over, do. Then again on PS2 ZOE2 looks stellar even to this day. Scud Race in arcades 1996 even now in HD looks amazing. It doesn't have to be cel-shaded or use pixel art. The art style and use of color can go a long way.

1996 SEGA Model 3. Less powerful than Dreamcast.

Still looks good.

The newer games have the advantage of non-dithered shadows, and massively superior anti-aliasing. That's why they look nice, and the Genesis' version of Virtua Racing looks terrible. 

But yeah, I agree that the low-poly PicoCAD look is gaining popularity with Indie devs for good reason. 

Unreal (1998) on release was mindblowing and I was one of the few lucky ones to experience it then with 3D acceleration (3dfx Voodoo 2), but it scales poorly on modern monitors and looks blocky as hell today. It is funny that Half-Life and Thief look better than Unreal today thanks to official and unofficial patches and the visual style and environments of those games. But I will never forget walking out of Vortex Rikers for the first time into what felt like a living and breathing alien world in Unreal. Console gamers had to wait at least a few years to experience something like that. Unreal could have been released on PS2/Xbox but with much lower resolution and with frequent and long loading times. Unreal was the Crysis of the 90s.

Mass Effect 1.

It was technically ambitious for an early 7th gen game but nowadays its horrendous framerate, rubbery character faces, and rampant texture pop-in make it a real eyesore.