Well its hard for me to be impressed by a corridor shooter that from all appearances is less dynamic than Resident Evil 4, Gears of War, Vanquish or the Last of US.
Ready at Dawn isnt a great developer and any old person an make a corridor shooter and pump it with some mad high res textures and add visual effects will nilly in a haphazard manner then whittle down a bit when they hit performance blocks.
I picked an old game because its easier to understand what being technically impressive is. Starfox is especially a good example because its one of the first 3D games ever made. Dylan Cuthbert and his team did amazing work and there is a lot of material to read up on about it.
Would you rather I mentioned a PC game? PC's are scaleable hardware.
Tomb Raider and Crysis in 3D on PC are freaking gorgeous but they're not technically impressive. They're just really fucking good looking games.Anything that you can just throw more hardware power at isnt really something to be proud of. Technology will get there anyway. Technological Impressive games are the ones that come from or lead to innovations in how games are crafted and written.
Look at Cryengine. Its real easy to make a game that looks good in it, but its really not dynamic. It suffers from similar issues that Unreal 3 did. They're pretty restrictive.
CD Project Red, John Carmack,Conker 64, The folks Gaben buys out,internal and external Nintendo, hell even Capcom. These guys are the ones who've really broken through in terms of development.
People who like pushing hardware and getting creative in how they create and code these games. Perhaps we'll be able to add Guerrila games to the list. They're not so good at making FPS campaigns, and I have a feeling its not something they've wanted to do at all. Their new RPG is probably something they've wanted to do.
As for why I didnt pick a PS1 game for my example? Hmm those are mostly FMVs