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Today, though, Nintendo released an online trailer for the $60 plug-and-play system. Amid a lot of '80s style marketing glitz, the video briefly showed some NES Classic Edition games in action, displaying what seems to be much crisper and more accurate HD emulation of the NES cartridges you remember.

You can see the improvements directly in the above gallery, with the NES Classic version on the left and the Wii U Virtual Console version on the right (images were sourced from official Nintendo trailers whenever possible to avoid issues with capture fidelity). As you can see, the NES Classic Edition versions are altogether brighter and crisper, with solid colors and well defined corners on the square pixels. It's the kind of high-fidelity ROM recreation that players on PC-based emulators are already used to, but Virtual Console players may be surprised by it (especially if they last played these games through the low-definition output of the Wii).

Of course, you could argue that these overly sharp pixels are actually doing a disservice to games that were originally displayed on fuzzy CRT screens with scanlines and phosphor-induced motion blur. While there's something to that argument, Nintendo's previous official NES emulation efforts ended up just looking muddy rather than authentically "retro."

It's hard to see the NES Classic Edition as anything other than an improvement (assuming the final hardware matches the "Product Under Development" shots shown in this trailer). Still, we're holding out hope that Nintendo also includes some sort of advanced image filtering options for players who want to try to truly recapture the gaming imagery of their youth.