Since I've done a bit of 3d work and modding myself, I can certainly appreciate some well-done eyecandy. While I have trouble coming up with specific examples, it's still always impressive to see developers find ways to use technology to make the games more engaging.
I guess one of the earlier situations where I was totally floored by the graphics was Silpheed on the Sega CD. Seriously, I still get shivers down my spine when I see that colossal ship/space station slowly slide into view at the end of the first level and then see it ripped apart by laser beams, sending polygonal debris flying all over in the background. A gameplay montage showing off some of the pretty effects can be
Found Here (sorry, for some reason my youtube embedding doesn't seem to be working)
Even though I had a few rough ideas about how graphics technology worked, it took me years to realize that all the pretty backgrounds in that game were actually streamed movies. Sure, the total lack of any shading or texturing makes the game look rather primative by modern standards, but it still amazes me how much effort they must've put into creating maybe an hour or so of pre-rendered video sequences and then synced it up with the gameplay so perfectly. And it also made me want to play the game over and over again just to watch that "movie" even though the gameplay was rather standard at the time.
In the Saturn/PS1 era, the backgrounds in Battle Arena Toshinden impressed me, especially that stage where it has a monitor in the background that shows what's on your screen (creating that weird picture-of-the-picture-of-the picture effect like when you hold a camera up to a monitor that it's displaying on). It was a nice framebuffer trick, and amazingly the effect is still used today in some games. Also, the water in the Panzer Dragoon games was always a treat to behold. Long before we had pixel shaders, the fancy effects that the half-broken Saturn architecture could pull off were really quite impressive, even from launch. I'm not even sure how they did it exactly even today, but I can tell it certainly used some fancy tricks.
Moving on, I was just impressed that the Dreamcast ran at a full 640x480 resolution. After being stuck in the Saturn/PS1 era for so long, and only getting a 3d accelerator for my PC a few months beforehand, I have to say that seeing games in full resolution on a TV, and later monitor, was marvelous. Somehow, it seemed to make every game better when you could actually see the backgrounds and objects in the game, rather than being either a muddy (N64) or pixelated (Saturn/PS1) mess. Also, pixel shaders were wondeful, finally the water in a game (Morrowind) was able to surpass what was seen in Panzer Dragoon Zwei over 6 years earlier.
Later on, lighting was the biggest thing that impressed me. Long before anyone knew of Doom 3, I was having a blast with Nocturne's shadows. Seeing a realistic lightsource casting a full shadow was a sight to behold, and actually being able to walk into and interact with it was impressive. They even managed to use the lighting for a few puzzles in the game. Doom 3 of course blew me away in the shadowing department, and even Silent Hill 2 got it's fame for it. Also, seeing HDR in action for the first time in Far Cry was truly amazing.
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I like how 10 years ago full-screen anti-aliasing was a breakthrough technology, and today it still is, only :noonecares:.
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It's actually a fairly big deal still, although we have yet to get to the point where AA on a console is something that's commonplace. They've been trying almost every generation to allow for it: the N64 had it in every game, but it was a rather archaic method of it which ended up bluring the games significantly (although I still greatly prefered it over the alternative of not having it at all); the Dreamcast and PS2 advertised the ability to do it but it was extremely difficult to get working properly on the systems, the Xbox was capable of it but most games ran too poorly when it was enabled, and now the Xbox 360 has a method for "free" AA but developers have to specially plan for it from the begining of their development (and high-profile engines like Unreal Engine 3 don't support it at all, oddly enough).
I for one would love to see more console games use AA (hell, my PC videocard isn't even as powerful as the one in modern console, and I still use AA on it with almost every game), but right now they seem more concerned with getting games up to playable framerates instead of adding features like tiling for AA which may or may not cause other problems further down the line.
Jam it back in, in the dark.
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