Totally. The pixels were carefully composed that way on purpose. Don't mess with them.
I've always been a "pixel art" purist. It even bugs me when games try to use pixel art but get it subtly wrong. For instance, a game might use sprites that are scaled up at different scales at the same time and/or rotated in high resolution. This just ruins it for me.
Yes! They got it right! Amazing. Thanks for this, I can use it as an example next time I am discussing with game developers that don't understand what I am talking about.
The problem is that, oftentimes, you have to mess quite a bit with the pixels to make them look the way the pixels looked on the original hardware: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1755886
I've loosened up on my pixel-tolerance. Remember that a lot of old hardware will support multiple resolutions and sprite scales simultaneously. So while sticking to a single scale for all manipulation has a certain aesthetic usage, it isn't the one true way. It's just "whatever the platform can do."
I've always been a "pixel art" purist. It even bugs me when games try to use pixel art but get it subtly wrong. For instance, a game might use sprites that are scaled up at different scales at the same time and/or rotated in high resolution. This just ruins it for me.