The trend towards computer-generated art

Modern technology could be misused when having all these sterile graphics all the way. On the other hand, the whole concept of non-destructive and scalable graphics editing is also very interesting and might save preciou$ time. It has to be done well however, and not everyone does. Also keep in mind that today's generation audience except a certain realism, while the older generation would be happy enough with a blocky Boulderdash-Rockford with an anatomy that's quite a joke. Also, yesteryear's computers usually had a single fixed res for their gaming screens, which means that one can pixel a single set o' graphics. These days there're insanely high resolutions. If you don't want your 2d gfx to mimic ants then they'll have to be scalable. Whenever things need to be scalable, a vector format is usually a good solution. As for texture mapping, glowing lines, wireframe etc. these are all just tools. I wouldn't want to manually try to dress a texture of some cloths around a person, it would look crap, let alone animating all that. The glow would be unpractible had it been manually pixeled.. what if you want more or less (or your boss wants that)? You'd need to adjust the whole shebang from scratch again, while it could take a simple slider to adjust the glowness.

The whole discussion is comparible with the famous Photoshop Lenzflare. We witnessed n00b-advertisements with their default Photoshop lenzflare for years in the 90's. Does that make Photoshop bad? Of course not, it's not Adobe's fault that ppl have overused lenzflares and thus 'doing it wrong'. Likewise one can blame those who make dull sterile gfx for a 2d game, but not the tools if they could as well have been used in a more creative way.