I've often felt this most with the Grand Theft Auto games, there was a level of visual abstraction in the III series that IV and V lost and trying to take in the world moving around you is too much.

Art is born out of limitations, if you only have a PS2 to work with you have to get creative to make it look good. Now you can just dump whatever you want into the game.

On a CRT the colors looked far more vivid.

Having game designers rather than film school hacks might have something to do with it.