Skyward Sword. Wii Motionplus and all of the programming that must have gone into the combat system in that game is impressive to say the least. It's also a graphically impressive game, even though the art style is a little wacky. Beyond that, mabye MH Tri or Brawl in terms of impressive graphics.

Yes, Boom Blcoks is a good example of a more optimzed game using the Wii's physics capabilities.

As you said, Skylanders has a large amount of geometry. It also has some fairly decent dynmaic shadows and character shading. Not quite on the level of Overlord, but it pretty good. They animation is extremely fluid and varied even at 60 FPS, and there seem to be some small scale physics running. Then there are also the special effects and enviornmental alterations. Combine all of this together on screen at once and you have a pretty diverse, high quality game.

What about Super Mario Galaxy, what about that makes it undoable on the Xbox?

The same things pretty much. Its doing to much at one at too high a frame rate. The shading,  the fluidity and effect diverstiy over an area that large with no load screens. The biggest thing of all is the rounded geometry.

Even the highest quality Xbox1 games were extremely block if you looked at them upclose. Especially the coveted PC ports or Doom 3 and Half-Life 2.

You couldn't reproduce this on the Xbox1 even at 30 fps. The polygon detail is too high. The number of animations is beyond what the Xbox1 could do at one time.

I see.

Sorry if I'm pestering you with questions but I find this fascinating and I'm trying to learn as much as I can.

I've been wondering about The Last Story and the Wii Call of Duty games.

The Last Story seems to push some nice effects, like reflective/refractive water, volumetric lighting, (it's probably just cleverly handled bloom, but it works) and depth of field, but it slows down a bit. Is it pushing the system, or just badly coded?

The Wii COD games (From World at War on) have also confused me. On the one hand, outside of some environmentt mapped scopes and water, they don't push many effects, and the textures and framerates can be pretty bad, but according to the devs it's pushing the Wii's CPU and RAM quite hard with so many characters at once, (each with allegedly 100 animated bones) as well as detailed streaming environments. Are they really impossible-on-Xbox achievements though, or again, just badly coded?

The devs are just saying that to make them look good as far as COD is concerned.  They said they couldn't get 12 people online at once but the conduit had 12 while it was pushing far better graphics at a higher frame rate.They shoved the games into the Wii and trimmed down anything that wouldn't fit. What you got was a dumbed down 360 game rather than a Wii game.

A game built from the ground up would have looked and performed a lot better.

The Last Story seems to be kind of sporadic to me. There are some place where some effects like reflections and environmental damage are implement and other where they aren't.

The slow usually occurs when there are large numbers of characters on the screen like during the marching scene in the beginning and in the huge open area battle.

Its honestly hard to tell. They poured a lot of money and time into the game, the graphics speak this well. I would say that they could have managed the resources a lot better. From what I can tell, the game is coninuously processing a lot of things even when it doesn't need to like characters who aren't on screen and things in the environment. It probably could have been coded a little better.

It hard to tell what the bottleneck is. It uses a lot of HQ textures so it could be the RAM. Then again, it had a lot of detailed modals and objects on the screen at once so it could be the GPU. Then it has so much A.I. going on with the enemies and your characters. It has some really nice A.I. I honestly can't tell what causes the occasional slowdowns.

I would honestly recommend asking Sakaguchi that himself on twitter. He seems to be pretty friendly and responsive to English speaking fans.

That is definietly volumetric lighting. Itwas also used in Overlord as well.

Oh, and how could I forget this game.

When it comes to character detail, I can't think of another game that did it better than Other M.

[mistake post]

Donkey Kong Country Returns should be one of them. 

What about Conduit 1 and 2? Those did normal mapped characters.

Project Zero 2: Wii Edition and Fatal Frame 4 also had very nice looking playable characters; they weren't normal mapped or anything, but were very high poly with some nice clothing animation.

The human characters looked pretty good in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Dead Space Extraction as well, with lifelike animations, particularly with their facial expressions.

I don't know much about the tech behind it, but it's certainly a gorgeous looking game; the animations are so full of character, the environments so beautifully detailed and dynamic, the framerate silky smooth, and best of all, as is expected from Retro, the art direction rocks.