There was a reddit thread about that just the other day so let me copy that response first:
They were really fascinating to me, even that "3D" version of Tetris and the Win 95 screen saver with the labyrinth were pretty cool at the time.
After the initial wow factor with games like Star Fox, Doom and Daytona USA (yeah there were some 3D games before that but I didn't play them until later) I was more picky though; I wasn't that impressed by Mario 64 when I saw it in action, nor Quake 1 but I saw that one about a year or two after it came out. Didn't like how Toshinden for PS1 looked either. Some games just looked kind of odd like GoldenEye with its photographed faces and smudgy textures.
Some things like texture warping and choppy camera movements on PS1 were just kind of weird at the time, as you weren't used to how it was supposed to look. Same with mixtures of 2D and 3D like in Terminal Velocity or Rise of the Triad (and many others), or the low framerate animations of Quake 1.
When I saw Quake 2, the blood particle effects, colored lighting and how bodies could blow into chunks, that was really impressive to me. I guess the next major leap was 3DFX graphics in Unreal and Dethkarz. Not a lot really wowed me after that for several years besides FF10, Shadow of the Colossus, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2.
In retrospect I am more into heavily stylized visuals like Rez, JSR, Wind Waker, Okami, Grim Fandango, Journey, etc. but I also dig that early flat shaded poly look as seen in Star Fox and Virtua Racing.
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"Did you generally prefer the graphics of 80s and 90s 2D games over the graphics of early 3D games like Quake 1, Zelda Ocarina Of Time, and Tomb Raider 1?"
This is very broad and my previous response was that it depended on the game. A lot of 80s 2D games weren't that visually appealing to me, being about 6 when I started playing 16-bit games and playing Amiga games pretty early. Various 2D games looked great but DKC for example was a big standout in that it looked like something completely new and you weren't quite used to how real 3D was supposed to look yet (I think I played Star Fox and Doom in the same year). A couple of years later that illusion was gone and you saw it for what it was, pre-rendered 2D with parallax layers. Anyway some 2D games still looked great after 3D started becoming mainstream, like Secret of Evermore, Red Alert or Warcraft 2. And some 3D games looked rough even when new but a lot of the excitement came from it feeling more like real-life due to the 3D movement and world. Simply moving around freely and actually exploring the backgrounds that were just backdrops in 2D, was amazing at the time. And for story, you could now see characters talking and expressing themselves much more clearly and with more advanced movement, so it became a lot more immersive than even pretty good 16-bit stories like Zelda 3, Beneath a Steel Sky or the aforementioned Evermore.
I think I was about 9 when I first played Star Fox, maybe 10 when I played Doom and Daytona USA. I also had a game history oddity, the Laseractive, with some FMV games on it like Rocket Coaster and Pyramid Patrol. That was more like 2.5D, with the car in the former being a sprite and the track a CGI movie, but at first the illusion was convincing.
Edit:
That PC video linked to above made me remember another early 3D game, Stunts, though I actually played it around the same time as Star Fox I wanna say. That game was really cool at the time, especially building your own tracks and crashing the car in creative ways. I also saw Corporation before Doom at a friend's house, someone's older brother was playing it, but it was too complicated for us to play.
I didn't play most of those racing and flight sim games mentioned; I guess they didn't appeal to me as a kid in screenshots and the boxes, which was what you had to go on early on. I do remember seeing pics of and wanting to play Ultima Underworld but it didn't happen at the time. Generally I was reading Nintendo Power for gaming news, which didn't cover PC, or checking the flyers that came with the games. By the mid-late 90s I was also reading PC Gamer and PSM.
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