New games can't impress me anymore. Everything looks similar, and some worse than the others.You can say oooh and aaah....but that is all there is to it and all wear down very fast.
Games that impressed me most are those which I was initially exposed to and grew up together. All are PC games. Consoles are specialized platforms and I expect nothing less than good stuff from them, so I can't be really impressed with 'em.
1. I was impressed with Police Quest 1's EGA graphics when I got my brand new VGA monitor and a VGA card. The colors were simply astounding.
2. Countdown - 256-colour "digitized" VGA graphics with live actors and synced speech!
3. Commanche Maximum Overkill - almost every gamer classmates of mine were absolutely blown away looking at the review pictures in a local newspaper!!!
4. Wolfenstein 3D - Very impressive pseudo-3D rendering. The grand daddy of the latest 3D FPSers, including Cry....sis. Every great 'uns have a very humble beginning. Doom was beautiful but it didn't have an impact like that of Wolfenstein 3D but I enjoy DOOM2 more than Wolf3D.
5. I think I was hooked to the Dune II - The Building of a Dynasty RTS game.
6. GODS - the wonderful bitmaps of the Bitmap Brothers.
7. Somehow, I was impressed with Descent more than DOOM. Maybe the complete freedom of movement in all 3 axes.
8. I remember saying "ooooh" looking at level 4 design onwards of Prince of Persia.
9. The surprising 256-color King's Quest V - simply gorgeous!
10. Links - I think it was THE best golf game at it's time, graphically. Nothing else came close to it. I don't like golf, but I remember spending insane amount of time with it.
Newer games - can't really point out - since game companies have left out focusing on gameplay and instead are focusing pushing out the most graphically impressive games, and instead of fully utilizing the graphics card's potential, instead started to program something even the next generation cards can't handle very well. It's sad to see, that to play everything at the highest setting requires the most expensive and most powerful card available today - and even then may not run everything at max in the options settings - the reason many players turn to console - no need to worry about upgrading graphics cardss every 6 months to play the next game.
But still, if I want to recall one modern game in 5 seconds, the thing that comes to mind is Titan Quest. Very Impressive. When you run on a jetty platform, you can see the water rippling around the wooden stands of the jetty due to the vibrations of the running action on the wooden platform.