Jeez! Why does everyone complain when there are more than 5 pages? Do you enjoy this site or not? It's like eating a bowl of ice cream and saying "I hate how good this is! And I despise that there is so much more in the bowl!"
I still prefer Sonic's palm trees on Megadrive over any piece of 3D object in the newer Sonic games! The number of parallax layers was another thing that made the first four Sonic games quite unique.
Speaking of trees - Virtua Racing (among others) had polygon trees way back in the 90's and GT5 trees are still a couple of crossed sprites... and the game is boring enough and gives you time to inspect them one by one as you pass by (that is if you're not drooling over your hyper-realistic car's back all the time)
I noticed that every single game where they said the best example of the item was in was a PS3 game. Maybe also a PC or Xbox 360 game, but always a PS3 game. Think about that...
I know it has been asked before, but DAMN how did you miss Crysis!!!???? I know the game play was nothing to write home about, but it still leaps and bounds better in graphics then some of the final examples given.
I am also surprised to not find Half life 1 or 2 under crates, the game was nothing but crates!!! Hundreds and hundreds of useless damn crates!!!
I guess its not possible to play and judge them all.