I like creating eye candy effects, but never as the goal to cover up a turd of a gameplay. If there is one thing I've always appreciated, it was style in a game. Things matched, didn't feel out of place, like a well told story. Now there were styles I didn't necessarily like but at least they held to it. The biggest problem with always seeing highest wow factor in graphics is that the payoff is far less than you could hope for. I remember seeing some weapons in turok (on n64) where if you use this bluish expanding spherical exploding weapon in the sky, the clouds tinted with the color during the effects. looked amazing. but it didn't really save the game from getting kinda boring.
One thing about realism. Either the realism of the human structure has to be well done or it falls flat. People respond poorly to close approximations of a face that act robotic vs their positive reaction to a face that is less realistic and still robotic. Going past that, while blasting badguys in a semi realistic environment is fun and all, when they get to the point of modelling blood spatter flying off a guy when you've shot him in the head, it's gone too far. I don't think people would find the game so fun. I've never played the game postal just because of all the demeaning garbage you do to "people" in the game. There are limits to which entertainment with high realism graphics should never aspire to reach. I'm no pansy, but it's not my idea of fun to see highly realistic, mutilated human corpses as the direct result of my entertainment.
That's my take on it.
There are many others in the game industry who've posted articles about their opinions on the games like gta and others resorting to the extra "sexual" content when it's not the main aspect of the game. That hidden minigame must have been on the damned project design if they had voices, animation and control schemes all setup. That shows severe lack of good judgement on the part of the company programmers, design team et all.
You can't beat it.