Every time I see a fucking "AI Machine learning upscale" mod that aims to make either a 20 year old game with low res textures or gods forbid a game with pixel art "HD" I die a little inside before going a absolutely feral.

I'm eternally fucking infuriated with how the ever growing movement of "graphics = quality/value" chokes the life out of art within the video game landscape. Modern conceptions of art have cheapened certain things to a frankly disgusting degree, so much so that I've genuinely heard someone say "it feels like they couldn't afford real art so they used pixel art" with their real human mouth. The idea that the more high fidelity something is the more value it inherently has both as art and as a project is reductive at best and fucking stupid at worst.

So many of these fucking mods and texture packs and filters and "remaster" projects create vapid facsimiles of whatever they're trying to "improve" or just flat out look like shit. The 20 year old texture you tried to replace with something a shitty AI site you paid for threw up has things like depth and shading built into it to assist with the limitations of its time as well as to match the game's art direction. All you've done is take a fucking butter knife to it and made it a flat confusing mess that barely looks like what it's supposed to anymore.

Look, I'm not against giving beloved old games new coats of paint. Texture packs and overhaul mods have always been a thing. But until recently they were made by people who fucking understood the inherent value of the art they were working with, and either aimed to give a new angle on it or change it all together into something new. And that's good! It's creativity! It's expression! What ISN'T either of those things is smoothing out all the beautifully placed pixels on a sprite from a super Nintendo game and going "ah yes now it looks like real art! So HD! So smooth!"

You cannot reduce the value of such a complex piece of art as a video game down to "well it's got 4K textures and 3D models with tons of polygons" to do so is insulting to the entire medium and the history of technology and skilled developers and artists who created them.