I think that you misunderstand me, Mike. I agree wholeheartedly w/ you, too many game makers these days are putting pretty graphics before a genuinely good game. I lament this as much as you do (well maybe not, since you play scores more games than me) and for the same reasons. I cant play a pretty-yet-vacant game any more than the next guy can, and I dont want to have to upgrade my system every 3 mos because the sys reqs are thru the roof yet again.
I dont consider myself a graphics whore, but I do expect at least passable graphics in this day and age, and anyone w/ any kind of reasonable budget is going to be able to tack on at least reasonable graphics. What passable constitutes is different things to different people of course, for instance I consider Gothic and Morrowind to still have good 3d graphics. I consider Baldur's Gate to have good 2d graphics. I have a great time playing all these games, I'm not about to dismiss them on account that theyre using dated technologies. But I'm also not stooping down (in my opinion) to play some Spiderweb game that looks like some poor NES port or something. I dont care how good you tell me the story is, I couldnt care less, I cant get into it. On the other hand, I wouldnt pick up Crysis (not really into shooters anymore), a game I have zero interest in, because it supposedly has teh cutting edge. You couldnt get me to play Crysis any easier than you could pay me to play Return to Krondor.
A lot of my appreciation of games is exploring, and being part of the virtual world put before me. If it just doesnt look interesting and at least a bit stylish and absorbing, I cannot bring myself to take it seriously and invest my time in it. Sometimes I can let it go w/ some quick lunch break cheapies or something, but nothing that I'm gonna sink my weeknights into, that's for sure