See, I have a different view.

For me, the photorealistic games of the PS2/Xbox/GCN era looked like shit, ALL of them. However, games like Mario Sunshine or Star Fox Adventures or Halo 2? I felt that those games had all the graphical firepower they'd ever need. That's why I understand why the Wii isn't that much more powerful than the Gamecube, because an upgrade wouldn't change everything.

With this generation, I feel the same way about photorealistic graphics as I did with the toony graphics last generation. Uncharted 2, Killzone 2, Heavenly Sword, etc all look fantastic, and I don't think I'll derive that much more enjoyment from the upgrades that will come next generation. For those games, the upgrades will be the same as the upgrades from Mario Sunshine to Galaxy, better draw distance, cleaner textures and shadows, lighting upgrades, etc. It'll all look better, but I'm fine with what I've got as long as it's fun too.

All I want is high-res. I hate jaggies. I don't care if the textures or polygon counts are simple. Just don't make it look like it's 1985. My favorite games were in the SNES era, and playing on emulators with heavy filtering is quite a lot of fun and pleasing to my eyes, anyway. I'll always prefer 2d to 3d. I guess it's what you grow up with.

The better the graphics, the more realistic the game is.

It's all about marketing:

good looking girl, soso voice

vs

ugly girl with great voice

who has a better chance of making it?

lol thats right but I think games like Heavy Rain and Alan wake are more about intensiveness/story then about fun..

lol thats right but I think games like Heavy Rain and Alan wake are more about intensiveness/story then about fun..

i know but , aren't you having fun enjoying the storyline?

if the game lets say... have GREAT GRAPHICS but has a voice acting like "Hey dude... i,  am , dying... yeah! ouch! (resident evil 1) " or gameplay which consists of repetitive as hell stuff. wouldn't that ruins the fun ?

to have fun doesn't mean the game must be mario it can be deep AND enjoyable at the same time.

Severance got it right. Fun doesn't necessarily mean the game is Mario, fun means you're enjoying it. And if you're playing a game without enjoying it, you shouldn't be playing it. I had lots of fun playing MGS3, for example, and the story was what I most enjoyed about it. And the story wasn't exactly comedy club material.

My threshold for 'good enough' was Super Mario Sunshine. Beyond that I can't tell which games look better, save for good art direction [but that's not a technology thing].

I'm with you Majin. Those two games are probably the best looking games last gen (I played cube version of TP) And I'm content with graphics on par with or slightly greater than those aforementioned games.

I' too am not overly impressed with graphics and they don't provide me with Wow factor in the least. I mean PC has been doing HD graphics for some time now I think during the N64 days.

I can look at a game like UC2 and acknowledge it looks fantastic but that alone would not hook me to the game. I have to ask would Mario Kart Wii be any better if the only improvement was graphical resolution?

That's the trick though, if a game is great its great regardless is its 1080p, 720p, 480p or 480i.