Someone called Morphcat made a game, an actual NES rom. It's really nice. It doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of attention so I'm posting it here (I saw it on Pixel Prospector.) I put it on the Wii and played it on the proper TV. I like the style of it and the progressive gameplay.
I just lost some respect for a lot of NES era games. This looks very good, looks like it controls nicely, and sounds amazing. Where was this during the NES?!
An advantage that programmers have now is that the NES hardware has a ton of documentation and there are communities of people helping each other out. I don't think they had that back in the 80s. Yeah you're right, this looks a lot better than most NES games I played.