There are some new trailers over at gametrailers too. The backgrounds are looking great - really just polished hi-def versions of the originals. I quite like the bright colours they are going for too. They work really well.
The sprites, well, I'm already on record as being not a fan of their drawings. Seeing them in motion has me considering it in a couple of ways though. As I suspected, the crisp drawings only serve to highlight how few frames there are in the animation. It looks really jerky. More than that, some of the animation, like the standing poses and walking animation, look really jittery. This is more than just a lack of frames. It's poor animation. I suspect that happened because they are drawing over each frame completely individually rather than considering each frame as part of a piece of overall animation.
After all, I wouldn't even think Udon would actually have animators on staff. It would have been very easy for even a mildly competent animator to smooth that animation up by interpreting those original frames a little better.
But, that said, they set about to recreate the original game in hi-def. And, to me, it looks like they really have succeeded. If you shrink down the videos, they hit a point where they look so like the original game it would be hard to tell the difference. So they seem to have achieved what they set out to do. In just delivering a hi-def version of a classic, well, this looks like it.
Considering what they're doing, I can't help thinking it's taking a bizarrely long time.