You are giving young kids everywhere a bad name with this statement.   

@ youngkid - I suspect you will be in the minority with that opinion there. And even if I did grant you that they look almost as good as MP3, they're still games from the end of the xbox's life, and so can only be compared to Wii games from 2011/2012

Petz Sports anyone? :P

Conker: Live & Reloaded

I think the conduit pic looks better than the doom 3 one..... well besides the AA which is horrible on that conduit pic.

The doom textures seem too low rez to me, the conduit ones look more smooth (dunno the terms sorry).

in any case to the op

1) lazy devs
2) Nintendo has a cartoony style, it will never look realistic. So wait for other devs :p

Mario Kart Wii's graphics are also underrated. Some of the tracks have lots of shading effects. Not on the retro tracks though (which have been kept retro style with a few upgrades). It also allows for 4-way splitscreen which may push the hardware too.

This is kind of funny, people turned this into a graphics war with a current gen system to last gen. Pretty much though the first and second page summed up the OP.

Developers are not putting effort into wii games to achieve graphics because the mass majority of people who own the wii do not care for them. Not saying everyone just saying those people who got drawn in by wii sports. They can get away with it and only have those true gamers complain who now are the minority.

Being that we know the Wii is more powerful than the Gamecube and few Wii games look as good as good looking Gamecube games, I think it is safe to assume that developers are not really focused on pushing the Wii's hardware to its limits ... I could be wrong but I suspect the focus on pushing hardware on other consoles comes from the developer's assumption that people bought that system because of how powerful it was, and they came to that conclusion because every console has been sold to consumers based on its processing power. I could be wrong but I suspect that few developers see pushing the Wii's hardware as being a necessity to selling games, so it becomes a very low priority.

Personally, I agree with them and as long as the visuals are well polished and the art direction is decent there isn't much of a need to push the Wii's hardware to sell games.

Things that I remember that looked aweseome were the Queen Bee in SMG (not sure it is a Queen though) and the beginning of Metroid Prime 3.

on the clonker pic...

the characters are nice but the suroundings are awfulL....
That is the same critic I have to the HD consoles, everything is just pasting textures and the texture is supposed to make the effect of cracks and depth... That is the 3D PC aproach that lets you upgrade graphics based on the power of the graphics card. Just look at the ground, the effect is definitely not well done there....
Consoles don't change graphics cards and thus should not have graphics based solely on nice textures.
(the characters are well done, I only complain about textures on the environement.... even the wood in the background stands out because it's not done the same booring way...)

On the mario pic it's not the textures that give the details, it's actually the complexity of the scene, the shapes given... The textures here are pretty basic actually.

That is 2 different aproch and I prefer the mario one.