One of the more interesting things from Call of Duty: World at War is not (nessarily) how hard they're pushing the hardware but how clever they're being ... I was reading an interview from the Call of Duty developers where they taked about how they were simulating effects that were only possible on the HD consoles and I was reminded of various forms of "Fake Bump Mapping"
Back in the day, many consoles (like the Dreamcast and PS2) as well as older graphics cards (Geforce 2) were not powerful enough to perform "Real" bump mapping, but they all ended up being able to play games that had surfaces that looked bumpy. One of the ways this was done was developers produced two textures for bumpy surfaces (one with a standard color texture, and one with shadows for when the surface was brightly lit) and blended these textures depending on how much light was on the surface. The shadows on the surface were (typically) wrong for where the light was in the environment, but you never noticed when you were playing the game.
Now I mention this not because the technique has any value on the Wii (it doesn't, the Wii easily handles bump mapping) but because I expect this type of approach to become more and more common as developers start pushing against the limits of the Wii's hardware.
