I saw this on TV this morning.

Problem:
The noun “affects” is the wrong word for this sentence.

Explanation:
The sentence was displayed on a TV program containing audience members’ reactions to a new movie.

The noun “affect” means emotion or feeling, and “I liked the visual emotions.” would make no sense.

The noun “effect” — as in “special effects” — means in this context an illusory phenomenon.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following phrases (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “visual effects” — 9,530,000 matches
• “visual affects” — 12,100 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the phrase correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 788:1, which is very good to excellent.

I also searched Google for “special affects” (with the quotation marks) and got about 59,900 matches. Although some of those seemed to be a play on “special effects” (with the ‘e’) — e.g., for a horse named “Special Affects” — many others (such as this one) seemed to reflect an ignorance of the “affect”-vs.-“effect” distinction.

Solution:
“I liked the visual effects.”