We make look for different things visually. To me I look at smoothness, detail and scope. What a lot of games do that make people go "wow that looks great" is add a lot of unnatural special affects, mostly in the form of filters, and they pump up a lot of the camera stats above how they really would look. That's why you get "shiny" plastic like characters with lots of weird visual affects that look cool but if you were watching a movie instead of playing a game you might question.
Metal Gear Solid shows it can do all the visual affects, by displaying them... a little bit, when they're needed. If you look closely, you'll see specks of dust in the air, things of that nature. They're just not over pronounced to show off, rather put out when ACTUALLY needed. All the visuals in MGS4 are subtle, but upon careful inspection... there.
The level of detail is huge, so much so that you won't even realize it until you look closely at every set piece. There were no cut corners, you zoom in and the detail keeps getting better. You look at anything for long enough and it looks real.
Other games are good at looking good... as the play through them in motion. Hell, Ninja Gaiden 2, which just got all sorts of praises for visuals, is just really unnaturally smooth and unnaturally shiny. There's no level of detail at all, not on the characters or the environment. It's corner cutting. You move so fast you probably won't notice.... or you like shiny, smooth things and don't care.
I've noticed this with a LOT of games. They crank up the AA, increase the light reflection of the characters past realistic, throw on some cool looking visual effect filters and nobody notices their tons of flaws.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is trying to look realistic. And for the record, it's Halo 3 that's actually not HD, not MSG4. If you're expecting native 1080P, are probably unknowingly counting out pretty much every game you would consider top tier.
As for every new game of the moment getting hailed the best looking, it's because these games keep topping each other visually. I don't expect MGS4 to remain on top for long, by the end of the year it'll probably belong to Gears of War 2, but have to see these games on my own TV to judge, being played. Not videos.
most tend to agree it's nothing too impressive, graphicly
