So has any game made you feel "wow this is next gen stuff right here"

[OldNewNewOld]

Last time I felt like that was God knows how long ago when I played Mario 64 and TLoZ:OoT because of how different it was from any previous game I played.
And that's when it stopped. Aside from better graphics "next-gen" didn't bring anything made me feel like it wasn't possible on the console before. It were just minor improvements rather than a huge drastic jump.
Mario's 3D movement and platforming where a huge WOW inducing experience. Same for OoT.

Thought I did feel something like "SO THIS IS THE THING REGGIE WAS TALKING ABOUT!" when I played Red Steel 2.Thought I didn't feel like "next-gen" just a "Damn the Wii is awesome". Similar feeling. Not sure if it counts.
Damn I want RS3 now. Why is Ubishit shit?

 

[Grant Stackhouse]

For me, it was the Sonic Adventure demo that came packed with my dreamcast, back around the year 2000. I was moving up from an N64 and my mind was blown by the amazing colors and textures. What really struck me, however, was just how perfectly round the rings were. It may sound odd, but after 4 years of only playing with N64 graphics, seeing a 3D object with genuinely round edges just blew my mind.

 

[AfroBattler]

I usually not really wowed by high definition graphics. Whenever I do have that wow moment it's usually for a more cartoony games that looks really good for that system. For N64 it was Banjo-Tooie which I played to death until the dreamcast came about and showed me Sonic Adventure which blew my mind like with Stackhouse. After that it was the gamecube's Mario Sunshine whose water looked amazing everywhere. Then it was the Xbox 360's Sonic Unleashed and it's hedgehog lighting engine that made the game look gorgeous. For this gen the only game that game me that feeling is Smash U cause everything else looks samey in terms of graphical style if you know what I mean.

 

[bumbledog]

For graphics: Probably laughable these days but I remember me and my mates being blown away by the first Gears of War on Xbox 360, thinking "wow those graphics". There was an awful lot of detail on the character models.

Without being a snob about "next gen" console, there's nothing yet that I haven't seen on my (similarly priced) PC. More recently I tried Trinus Gyre with Google Carboard and played Skyrim in VR- which was, literally, an eyeball-melting 10 minutes. Having depth perception in a game is something that a verbal explanation simply cant do justice.

For innovation:
Seeing enemy gunfire peck chunks of brick out of the wall next to me and spotting smoking gun barrels on FEAR was awesome. The AI on FEAR still makes me sweat.

Any other games you tried with VR? I'd imagine Fallout and Bioshock would work well with those.

I bet they'd be awesome. I've tried Opposing Force and FEAR using the makeshift cardboard-Trinus frankenmess and that was really cool too, again for having depth perception. Alas VR isnt really practical on a Galaxy S3 and I value my retina's so I'll wait for something affordable with better pixel density to come out. -or a proper VR set