The screens look great with some things actually looking worse than the wii version. This is mostly like others have mentioned the jaggies are less notable. Here is the thing though. When I watched the video posted in this thread I saw just as much jaggies as I do when I play with my Wii. Also the video clearly shows there are shaders that are not working properly.(now this may be fixed). So as of now the game looks no where near as good as it does on a wii imo. It has potential though and maybe those who dislike the Wii because of graphics could actually play the games before they bash them. ;)

Oh and does anybody have games like windwaker and okami running on this. I want to see what games with that art direction look like with this.

I'm glad you had a more positive experience, and maybe the majority would agree with you.

But the bolded part is objectively false: just look at the Mario model in 720p in the first picture and tell me that it is not much improved over the 480p version, though it was not designed for 720p. It is obvious, really, since that model is finely detailed and it's zoomed in to fill almost all screen during the animations after you collect a star. Thus, there's a lot of detail that the extra resolution can bring out during normal gameplay.

The best you can say is that you don't care about the improvements, or that you find them marginal, and that's fine because that's in the realm of subjective evaluations. But saying that there can't be any because the game was not designed for 720p is 1) illogical and 2) disproved by facts.

As for the progress in emulation: the latest release notes out explicitely talk about improvements in SMG, and there seems to be new versions out every 40-60 days. I'm pretty confident that Dolphin will improve steadily its support for the top Wii games.

Yay, now I can just download SMG and play it on my computer! No more money for you Nintendo!

Heh I'm not holding my breath especially since emulators for even older systems still have issues.

And when you put that 720p mario you posted 8 feet away from you and on a TV screen you're not going to see much difference. 

I'm speaking from a practical standpoint, you're not seeing more detail just an image thats a bit more clear that will be less clear if you take it off a computer monitor that is right in your face and put it across the room while you're actually playing the game. 

Heh do this, put the image you posted on your PC screen, walk back 8 feet and tell me how big of a difference it really makes for you, then do the same and watch that video in motion, it practically looks the same except the emulated version has many graphical issues especially with the shaders that overall brings down the quality of the visuals.

Your "walk back 8 feet" thought experiment is faulty, because PC screens have higher DPI than TVs i.e. smaller pixels.

I'll save you the trigonometry but the angular size of a pixel on my Macbook (13",1280x800, watched from ~55 cm) is about the same as that of a 720p image watched on my 42" plasma from my couch at ~200 cms of distance (1.40 vs 1.28 minutes of arc).

The same math says that in these conditions a person with good eyesight would keep distinguishing the pixels (1 minute of arc) up to about 900 pixels along the vertical. Factor in the AA (and latency on LCDs) and 720p can be enough, but 480p isn't for me and many other people.

Anyway, I'm glad you are now speaking of subjective impressions, as I never contested the fact that for some people and in some conditions the (objective) improvements could be negligible.

Huh I never knew I wasn't speaking for myself and others like me, I never speak in absolutes, the only things I said were definitive was the fact that the game looks jacked up on the emulator and that's undeniable.

I can run the game on my Wii on my 15 inch 480p TV and it looks much better then that HD video of the game in motion on the emulator.  If I run it on my friends 1080p LCD TV like I described, it looks MUCH better then that HD video does, the "jaggies" that are apparent on the 1080p TV are also apparent in the 720p images in the OP. I could go on about my big screen in the living room but it's not going to change much.

My message this whole time has been that you won't get much better visuals, clearer picture sure, but visually it doesn't change things, its not like you're going to spot some little detail you never saw in the 480p gameplay. Nor does a screen shot in 720p make the game look any more AMAZING then it does in 480p, that is what I have some issues with because if the users think it looks amazing in 720p with jacked up graphics then why didn't they say as much when 480p screens and weren't jacked up were shown off?

I'm just old school, practical is my middle name, and for the average user they're not going to gain much from the game playing in 720p, in motion no one but technophiles care if they see a slightly pixelated line goes across their screen, unless you're going to make love to screen shots it's not going to improve your visual enjoyment of the game.

The screens look great.

But the Wii version looks better.

720p of acid trip.

Did anyone else notice that the game is running at about 75% (or less) of the speed the Wii version does?  It really stands out on the jumps and spins.  Mario hangs in the air too long on the jumps, and the spins look really slow.  Seems like a game breaker to me.