When a 40mb game like Lost Winds looks better than 95% of Wii disc based games ...it's fairly obvious it's purely down to lazy devs.

 Did you even read the thread? If you haven't read it. If you have read it again. The focus of this thread is not why can't Wii produce visuals on par with the 360 and PS3 because it can't. The crux of issue is the fact that inspite of the Wii being more powerful than the Gamecube, PS2, and original X-box, developers continue to put substandard games that look worse than Dreamcast titles. There has yet to be a 3rd party Wii title that surpasses Rogue Squardon 2 on GC in graphical quality and that was a launch title for Gamecube.

Nintendo's games, especially SMG, are great demonstrations of how many effects and detailed graphics can be put into a Wii game... I have yet to see a third party even come close to that kind of graphical awesomeness.

Nintendo's games usually run at 60 fps with few or no instances of slowdown. That's an uncommon feat in PS3 and 360 games, many of them can't even run at 30 fps without stuttering. This is the kind of the thing you can't evaluate from screenshots. If Nintendo had the same standards as most PS360 developers in terms of framerate, I'm sure the typical Wii screenshots would be even more impressive, but I do prefer stable and high framerate over detail.

Naturally I read the thread. The whole point of my post was that whilst the Wii is more powerful, the success of Wii sports and Wii play has shown developers that there is completely no need to produce Wii games with hardware pushing visuals. Wii sports sets the visual tone for other games to follow. This is the only visual quality bar that developers need to match up to. Once that is met there is simply no need for them to push resources into graphics enhancement as most people are happy with it. I'm sure most of them have also assumed that most people who want system pushing graphics are going to buy a PS3 or 360. Another reason for them not to waste resources on graphics development for Wii.

Don't blame developers for not pushing the hardware, blame Wii sports for setting the entry bar so low.

The list that Grampy posted earlier shows this. Only 3 of these games have good graphics, the first 3.

RE4 Wii

Red Steel

I repeat what I stated a few months back ago.
One of the advantages Wii has over the HD consoles, as many developers have noted, is it's cheaper to develop game for.
One of the disadvantages of the Wii is it's cheaper to develop games for.

If the Big N want to make a game with a lot of work put into graphics then of course it would put all their effort to max out their own console.(that's a no brainer) But if a third party want to invested into maxing out a console graphics then they have a choose of which console they want to max out. More likely they would choice to max out PS3/360 rather than spending the same effort in maxing out the wii knowing to PS3/360 owners graphic matters more than wii owners.

Either way there are only a few game of any given console where the developer spend the resources to max out the console's capabilities.

I think you're subtly making the same mistake I saw someone else making in this thread (or was it somewhere else?).

According to all the info I've heard, the lower development costs on the Wii are not mainly due to lower engine programming costs. Most of the savings come from needing less graphical artists to produce textures and geometric models.

Since the Wii has lower resolution and processing speed than PS360 games, you don't need as much detail in the textures and models, which allows you to hire less artists. The same artist will produce more (but less detailed) content while working on a Wii game than when working on a HD game. Two textures instead of one in one hour. Three characters instead of two in a week. Two levels instead of one in a month. I pulled all those numbers out of my ass, but you get the point.

This means that maxing out the Wii in terms of graphics is still cheaper than maxing out one of the HD consoles. To make it even worse, when making a HD game you typically have to develop your game for two platforms, since it's hard to financially justify making PS3 or 360 exclusive games (unless you get a moneyhat from MS/Sony, in which case you probably won't worry much about costs anyway).

You the only one I've seen who made this claim. 3d art cost no matter the resolution of hardware.

HD demands more on the hardware since you can see more details of the 3d models for a distance. The hard work still has to be done on the 3d models so the models doesn't look like crap with close ups. Yet in games like SSBB these details are seldom seen during game play running only in 480p.

Also it noted that developing a game when it comes to the expensive art can be uses for both 360 and PS3 with easy since they pretty close in power. This is the reason why the Wii version of Civ Revolution was put on hold while Ps3 version wasn't. The art work had to be totally redone with the Wii version (limited ram) and Fixaris didn't have a PS2 version to fall back on nor the man power to continue.

all the real wii fans have known for a while that the system is able to do so much more then what devs are putting in, only people that want to see it fail cant see past that fact

Who's "all real wii fans?"

^ Bolded. You obviously aren't very well informed. A quick example off the top of my head:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2007/12/18/kazunori-yamauchi-dishes-more-gran-turismo-5-details

Kazunori Yamauchi: GT5 cars take 6 months to model

"In GT and GT2, both for PS1, a designer spent a day to model a car. In GT3 and GT4, for PS2, the same worker spent a month modeling the same car due to the increased amount of polygons. In GT5 for PS3, they require six months to do the same job," Yamauchi explained.