Which ones were graphically impressive for their time though?

That generation had a problem with color, brown was realism, color was for kiddies. But a lot wasn't graphically impressive, just crunching higher resolutions. Alan Wake was graphically impressive as well as KZ2. I wouldn't call the ugly now. Motorstorm, also impressive at the time and still good. The first dead rising was impressive, still good. Test Drive unlimited though, looking very rough today.

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. 

Which ones were graphically impressive for their time though?

That generation had a problem with color, brown was realism, color was for kiddies. But a lot wasn't graphically impressive, just crunching higher resolutions. Alan Wake was graphically impressive as well as KZ2. I wouldn't call the ugly now. Motorstorm, also impressive at the time and still good. The first dead rising was impressive, still good. Test Drive unlimited though, looking very rough today.

It was also ugly for me. I used to even struggle to understand what was going on in the screen sometimes, with 2D graphics everything was more clean and easy to understand. This is how Rayman looked back in PS1, it still beautiful for me:

The exception for good looking 3D games were game that were more cartoonized. Donald Duck, Aladin Nasira's Revenge, and Crash Bandicoot comes to mind as game that are still actually nice to look at. Curious or not, they are all platformers 

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..

Yeah it's a lot like that for me too; I do a lot of retro gaming and when I go back and play something on PS1 or the original Xbox for example my mind kinda sets its expectations according to the hardware and I can appreciate them by their own standards.

That said, some games have definitely aged better than others haha.

This actually got me thinking, I've been playing the original RE games on PS1 (well, haven't gotten to 3 yet since I'm doing them in order and 2 has a lot of replay value ), and man 1 is wayyyyyyy more ugly than 2. 2 actually has a very nice aesthetic for a PS1 game. 1 by comparison is pretty bad looking. I don't think it helps that they want for a less cluttered, less detailed, more barren aesthetic for the environments. 2 is so lively in comparison.