You must be a talented chef. The talentless unimaginative people that are terrible at cooking are forced to pay $300 for a great meal or eat vegemite sandwiches.

I'm going WAY off-topic here with this one, but since food is the number one thing in my life...

If you want to start on the road to culinary mastery, the web is a good place to start. Sites like recipezaar and allrecipes have a bunch of fairly tasty step-by-step instructions for many dishes. As a bonus, many of them are "semi-home made", so you can ease yourself in. When you start to get a grasp of how ingredients and flavors work, you can use the same recipes and give them your own twists. And once your really confident, the sky's the limit.

...Not that I think anyone particularly cares...

Or try a regular restaurant.  That would be the Wii financial equivelant for this asinine analogy of which noname and I stated can serve up food just as tastey.

People go to the $100 per plate black tie affairs not for the food but to see and be seen.  It's a social spectacle.   Do you have a PS3 just because you want others to see how financially well off you are?

Maybe the answer to this question is that once you get beyond a certain point, graphics do not matter.

If you know you are playing in a make believe world, does it really matter if you have super textures or super-duper textures (to use some technical terms).

In other words, would Super Mario Galaxy have been any better in HD with 5 o'clock shadow on our protagonist?

I have heard a theory that once graphics become too life-like, people start rejecting them because they appear to be soulless representations of humanity. Maybe the Wii just prevents this from happening.

Mike from Morgantown

The Uncanny Valley.

The closer to life-like we render, the more flaws are revealed because of our inability to replicate real life on the same level we are familiar with obvserving it and therefore we can find it silly, zombie-like or even grotesque.

Actually the Valley can be overcome: Twestern posted some video (The Reals or some such, you can ask him) that did a fantastic job of seeming lifelike. The problem we as gamers have is that overcoming the valley remains absurdly time consuming and expensive for now. So if developers can't afford HD costs, they're definitely not going to be able to shell out enough to surmount the Valley anytime soon.

But I'll admit the eye-candy possibilities are enticing, if someone was willing to bankrupt themselves for "art."

I don't know, ask Chad Warden.

"Six hundred dollas ain't shit to Chad Warden.  I wipe my ass with six hundred dollas."

My Wii has been collecting dust for 17 years

Indeed it can be overcome but it's such a developmental and financial burden that it's not really warranted (at hsi point) to persue it as a standard goal of achievement.

Curious, the video Twestern posted, was it rendered on the fly as a game console would or pre-rendered? 

$600.00 ain't shit to me either.  It's $600.00.    Don't think I'll be wiping my ass with it anytime soon, though.

Can't recall, I'm afraid, and I can't find the video anymore either. I'm fairly confident that the rendering was on the fly, as that was half the point, but I could be wrong. Maybe Twestern recalls what I'm talking about, and can tell us.