im with you on this one snowbound... when you cant come up with a good enough game just make it pretty and nobody will notice your lackluster plot, repetitive game-play, shallow characters, poor AI, and bad controls; I'm looking at you here crysis.
monkey island was one of the best games of all time, its graphics look like shit.
League of Legends
this game installed off 3 floppy disks originally and didn't support a mouse. and yet it is still one of the best games ever because the plot is hilarious, that characters are extremely memorable (guybrush threepwood is taken for just about every login everywhere
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Guybrush_Threepwood#Promotion_and_reception and who would forget such characters as fester shinetop, meathook, Ghost pirate LeChuck, Herman Toothrot, and Smilin' Stan S. Stanman, or simply Stan
anyhow, there are far far far more important things in video games then graphics... nobody cares though. crysis made EA more money then all 5 of the monkey island's have combined