Okay you got me with golden eye, I confess. But the main point is, that everything seems to have scaled with the technology, but the traditional art skills have been let out to pasture. Theres been very few games pop up of late such as TF2 that actually do something thats anything exploratory and original with all this…
Did you only get into game dev recently? I'm 25 now and I was into texturing around the Quake 2 era. My first industry gigs (freelance and in-house) were 100% diffuse handpainted texture work. Looking back on my old stuff I think I could have made a much more awesome result if I'd been allowed to work with the tech…