Ugly today doesn't mean always ugly plus like portable seeing them on the original display medium they were created for makes a difference, another thing to take into account is the role of motion/animation in aiding our perception of visual quality I Assume it would have had an even greater impact back then in regard to motion v static compared to today

and going back my first games machine came with 64k of memory but was also loaded with a petabyte of fun. 

Daytona USA, i Remember thinking how good that game looked than seeing it now, its just a bunch of polygons, game is still awesome to play still.

Well,even though i can understand that ps1 games etc look ugly for today standarts, i somehow find it has a certain charm to them.

Games like suikoden btw still look impresisve to me.

But yea ps1 games mostly don't age well haha

Any open-world game pre-Oblivion. It's always harder to have finer details in that sort of game. Games like GTA3 were mind-blowing because they were so open, but the actual environments and models are terrible and often barely look better than N64 graphics. Morrowind fares somewhat better, but its models and textures are still very hard on the eyes. Oblivion is the first open-world game that I feel still looks decent. The human models have aged terribly, but the environments and bright colors still pop.

I will agree some of the visual assets haven't aged well in Mass Effect.

However, the framerate and pop in was considered bad at the time. I just thought the 360 was being pushed to its limit given that was one of the most impressive games of 2007.

To be fair that's not the best the game can look. Seems like the gamma is too high and the game looks much better when the resolution is boosted.

It's very easy to trash 5th and 6th gen games, but honestly I think a lot of the great games of that era really used the limitations of the hardware to their advantage, creating a stronger atmosphere with the low-res textures. Can't help but feel the reason people think they hold up poorly, is because they don't know how to make them look good on a modern tv, or they have watched heavily compressed youtube videos uploaded in low resolution.
I played through the Panzer Dragoon trilogy on Saturn resently, and was blown away by the atmosphere, mysticism and lore they were able to create with their visual style. The remake of the first game threw all of that away. Also Night into Dreams' visuals have a dream-like quality that fits very well with the themes of the game, creating a brilliant atmosphere, that wasn't entirely preserved when the textures were updated for the 7th gen remaster.

Too me the visuals that don't hold up well are not the blocky old ones, but those that didn't really have an identity to begin with. Especially during the 7th gen we saw a lot of that. I remember how people were amazed by GTA4's visuals. Rockstar really worked hard on those, so hard in fact, they forgot to make a fun game. The reviewers were unanimously impressed by the graphics, but they just look like shit today.

The fifth one isn't much better

I actually hardly ever think something that looked good back then looks ugly now. When I play something older, I just get in that state of mind where you just judge things relative to what they can be. The things I find ugly now are also the things I found ugly back then and those are usually terrible and terrible looking games to begin with. I’m talking Superman 64 or Bubsy 3D. Good stuff like the 64 Zeldas, Banjo or Crash still look good to me. Nevermind the better stuff from the 4th and 6th gen.

It took this thread for me to realize that some people considered Goldeneye 64 "graphically impressive" tbh. For me, it was always ugly, even back in 1997
Almost the entire first gen that did the jump to 3D (PS1 - N64) aged terribly, but at the same time I grew up with those games so I dont care much. Some games that I used to think looked pretty, like Ogre Battle 64, still feel that way and are still a blast to play.

Pre rendered backgrounds were a smart way to bypass the limitations of the era and usually looked good. 

I remember in 1997 the Madden franchise was taking a lot of flak for still using sprites when it's competitors like Gameday NFL Gameday were using polygons.  (Madden switched over to polygons the following year.)  But, even at the time, I thought the sprites in Madden NFL 98' looked so much cleaner and more realistic than NFL Gameday 98's cartoonish looking polygons.