> Recently finished FFX and now playing through FF7...they cannot rely on the graphics to sell themselves and had not yet been 'hollywood-ised'
Um...Final Fantasy games, ever since at least 7, were absolutely selling themselves on their amazing graphics. Hell, 7 was maybe the first time that games got cinematic commercials on mainstream TV, because the graphics were that amazing for the time.
That being said, since I've gotten a Steam Deck and hooked it up with RetroAchievements (which gives thousands of retro games achievements you can get), I've been playing through a lot of older games again. A few weeks ago I got a ridiculous (for me at least) high score in Kirby's Pinball Land for the original Game Boy, for example (it was >800,000 points).
Some others I've replayed recently are Wave Race 64 (the gameplay and waves in that still hold up, I actually appreciate it more than I did then), Wendy: Every Witch Way on Game Boy Color, started yet another playthrough of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (I've replayed that game so many times), got about halfway through Donkey Kong on the original Game Boy, tried Puzzle Link for the Neo Geo Pocket for the first time and got addicted to that for a little while, played a good chunk of the way through Kirby and the Amazing Mirror on Game Boy Advance, played through most of Kickle Cubicle for the original NES (I remember finding it too hard to figure out when I was a kid, but it really isn't, and it's a lot of fun).
The achievements are nice because they serve as a bit of an auto documentation of what I've been playing (I was able to share that list because I looked through my achievements on RetroAchievements).