I'm of the camp that can appreciate good graphics so I'll say better graphics don't make games worse either.  It's when games rely on graphics instead of making an actual good game.  

*goes on a rant.  You can stop reading now.

I mean, a good game is a good game.  I played Super Mario World this morning as my "First game of 2014" and it was still fun despite having graphics from 1991.  Meanwhile a game like Heavy Rain is more of an "experience" than a game.  I tried to replay it multiple times and I just couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't having any fun.  Hell, I'm caught up in Beyond Two Souls but I can't play more than 30 minutes at a time because it's mundane as fuck despite being a beautiful game with a captivating story.

I hope we can go back to the days where an intriguing premise and fun gameplay get supplimented by spectacular graphics.  Why back in my day, we blah blah bah....blah blah...blah.  Now Valkyria Chronicles, Street Fighter 4, 'Splosion Man, THOSE are real blah blah blah....and gas used to cost 75 cents!  None of this Cartoon Network stuff, either.  We had cartoons on Saturday mornings ONLY!  Then the Disney Afternoon came along with Ducktales and blah blah blah.....

*ends rant*

Compared to the PS4, the Wii U is not that great  It's a much stronger system than people give it credit for, but so are the other two next gen systems. In time if the PS4 dominates, there is going to be a huge golf between the systems' graphics.

Luckily for Nintendo in this day and age graphics scale really well. Having worse resolution, worse models, worse animations, worse textures, worse framerate, etc. are much better than missing entire aspects of the game. That's assuming the Wii U gets a port of course.

Allow me to share something I've read on the internet some time ago while investigating about how powerful the Wii U actually is:

"Alright this has been pissing me off about people. I myself have gone through 4 years of college in the pursuit of becoming a game developer (looking at Crystal Dynamics), and the first thing they tell you in college: on today's modern systems anything is possible. Anything, so long as you program it right. Nowadays people think more power will allow us to do more, but that is completely wrong. In fact, it's backwards thinking. All more power has allowed game developers to do, is become lazy programmers.

As consumer, power should mean shit to you. You don't have to deal with system limitations, developers do. When these professional developers make their games, if they wrote more efficient code, there would be absolutely no need to make 3 different versions of the same game. Instead, they write these high end combiners and render unneeded stuff for the more "powerful" systems simply because they can get away with it. Then they make the Wii/Wii U versions not as good looking simply because they are too lazy to fix up their mistake of inefficient code.

Don't ever let the power of a system deter you from buying it, because no matter how powerful a system is, you as a consumer do not deal with the limitations. If a Wii U and PS4 were the same price, then yeah, bad deal for you. But it's not, it's at a reduce cost and the specs aren't too different. Buy a system for the games YOU want, not because a game developer said the system is weak because that assimply isn't true."

As far as my knowledge goes I think most, if not everything, he is saying is true. I saved it because I found it quite interesting and decided to share it with a friend that knows more on the subject than I do.

Yeah, most modern graphic engines scale very good... just compare the performance of some PC games with "normal" settings and with "extreme" settings. But even the best scaling has it's limit. The level design of many future titles will find its common ground in 4 - 5 GB free RAM for the PS4, XBO and PC versions. With reducing texture details, effects and other stuff, the game would probably work with 3GB or even 2 GB free RAM. With only 1 GB RAM available to games (or maybe 1.2 - 1.5 GB RAM after reducing the OS footprint by a major firmware update) and a different architecture than the other 3 systems, downscaling will be not enough in most cases... whole levels and perhaps even some gameplay features will have to be redesigned to fit in the WiiU memory and the porting costs explode.