I don't know if it's all about setting expectations or more about if the games fullfilled their roles, there were fugly games in every generation and i always thought that it was both when they tried to do some over complicated stuff that the console graphics obviously weren't going to cut it or when they didn't even try and did simplistic and ugly graphs since the beginning.

I can't think of a specific game that i said "oh wow that looks amazing"  and now i think "looks like garbage", i always take in consideration the time the games came out and the limitations in account alognside how good it plays and how if all that is presented in conjunction fullfills their purpose, most of the time i think that if something looks bad it always looked like that, for example the original Star Fox, ok had decent/good gameplay and was entertaining trying to perfect every route and and it was a technical achievement for it's time, buuuuuuuut let's not kid ourselves it looked like ass even back then with the "polyhedra" in the graphics, i played the Star Wars PC games of the time and also Wing Comander I,II and academy and they always looked better than Star Fox at representing their universe.

Other cases for example in the first generations pong, pac-man, space invaders, asteriods, centipede, all have anything they needed graphically speaking, you can "improve them" by making the graphics prettier if you want but it really doesn't add much to what they already perfectly did in transmitting what they needed with both the gameplay and the graphics, unlike games based on movies that since the Atari era were a complete mess because oversimplication and complexity, as other user said is like Resident Evil, second one still does its job pretty well, but first one was terrible.

I actually think Starfox holds up okay due to the simplicity of its non-textured polygons and the way they were mixed with high quality 16-bit sprites.

There are still games were I was once impressed by that look ugly to me now though, even when I try to take into account the technology of the time, as I've said Mass Effect 1 for instance, also Perfect Dark, the 5th gen Tony Hawk games, Rogue Squadron 1, etc.

That said, there are games of the same era I have no trouble going back to now, even some 3D 5th gen games like Crash, Spyro, Croc, Banjo Kazooie, Starfox 64, etc.

Myst was a phenomenon when it came out, yet as so many games where graphics are the main draw

It really isn't appealing anymore

Riven hold up a bit better but also looks very simplistic and the videos are awful full of compression artifacts, but it don't find it ugly. Myst however, eesh. The much older Lucasarts adventures all kept their charm.