For nintendo, it meant changing their long standing design ethic and actually developing high resolution textures, they were pretty good with making models so that wasn't really a huge issue, they did however grossly underestimate the associated issues with improving resolution and fidelity in that for sub hd games you can use paralax textures or sprites to add detail, imagine you have the corner of a building that you want to add a bush to, just a flat texture slightly distanced from the wall would have a fairly decent effect in sub hd, in hd however such practices stand out like a sore thumb, the same goes for scaling UI and menu elements.

For others whos production ethic included designing high resolution textures and models then downgrading to suit the performance band youre aiming for, the process is a lot simpler because youre already used to creating the assets that work well for HD, the difficulty in this sense comes from your existing engines capability to properly use the new hardware effectively, as you increase the resolution you have to increase textures and shader complexty to match else you end up with pretty but horribly flat worlds.

Hand in hand with that difference is that the engine becomes stressed in different ways, what normally would have been an issue of fine tuning monster placement, ai and LOD to maintain a stable experience suddenly becomes a balancing act of aking use of the ram with unique texture and shader data while not stressing the render pipeline to a point where the framerate drops abruptly, in that sense the priorities for the older engines change, and understanding and working with these pirotities takes time and experience.

Nintendo gets around this somewhat in that games such as Mario Kart and many Mario titles aren't actually that stressful for the hardware beyond texture and model handling because they still largely lean on their art directon to mask the simplicity of the environments, equally they focus defail on the player character and interacting npcs so if you stop for a screenshot, what you see is a nice model and a pretty world, unless youre technologically minded you wouldnt really be all that needed to understand what makes the image, or the trickery involved in delivering the otherwise pleasing scene to the screen.

The jump to modern API and technologies such as advanced shaders and core load balancing, engine optimizations and modular codebases requires a bit of learning, esepcially if you're coming frm a somewhat oldschool approach towards game design as many Japanese studio tends to do.

For Monolithsoft, they are still stuck in the "rut" of transitioning from a subhd design ethic to a hd one, I would be surprised if their next project wasnt substantially more impressive than XCX both visually and in scope, because once the time and effort to leard the idiosyncracies of newer technologies and approaches is outof the way, you learn to take your engine and either scrap it entirely, or modularize it to be able to swap out or update portions of it to suit the particular game while best utilizing the hardware to hand, without that you just end up with a hack job engine that works but does so in a wasteful manner.

Sony and Microsoft are no different however, Early 360 and PS3 games were pretty low on the pecking order in terms of technology use, and its only publishers who had taken the time to expand their horizons into hd development that were ableto put out titles that made fair use of the new technology, take ridge racer 6 and 7, pretty poor by todays standards but they at least had the technological know how from their arcade devisions development of both hardware and software to back up the newer technologies in the Ps3 and 360.

If you take Epic games as an example though you see a clear divide in technology use compared to other developers, earlyon the xbox 360s life, and thats down to the experience the developer has in building an engine with functionaility for the latest technologies on PC, indeed their own engine, Unreal.

It's no secret Nintendo rarely plays the leader when it comes to technology use, and the few times they have they rarely made extensive use of those benefits, even with the n64 memory expansion, the difference it had on games that utilized it was still pretty mediocre.

To put it simply, Nintendo delayed it's requirement to learn the processes of modern tech and optimizations, as well as best practices for asset development because art direction was prioritized over asset quality, while that's a fine and dandy approach for SD, it isn't a good practice for HD, other developers, primarilly those who release for multiple platforms, already invested the time and effort to learn these technologies to aid in the production and release of games on said systems.

It Isn't beyond Nintendo however, not by any stretch, they obviously have the tallent to do HD, they just underestimated the time it would need, largely contributing towards the frequent delays of most titles and the extended dry spell of games.

For the most part I agree, though there have been some past Nintendo games like Metroid Prime 2 & 3 and Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 that did a pretty good job of pushing the hardware. On Wii U, however, they have been very conservative, yes.

I do expect Retro to come back in full force and push the Wii U to new limits when they finally reveal what they've been working on after Tropical Freeze.

Here's hoping they're not goinng to disappoint me by announcing an other Donkey Kong game... 

Yep!, same res.

Im dumping the screenshots I take here: http://imgur.com/a/tDr0p

Very obvious and very strong spoiler warning to everyone clicking that link, if there arent spoilers in there already, there will be.