'Build spires of once-were-chairs, wander through a faded landscape of assumed logical choices, and sail the mushy seas of half-remembered pixel art conventions,' Pipkin says. Which leads me to coo over Everest Pipkin's Mushy, a new free tileset for isometric games generated by machine learning with the intention of creating a glitched-out look that's just not right. I'm a hoary purist who still plays Quake pixellated without texture filtering so I'm not mad keen on these hallucinated manglings, but I do like the technique as an act of creation rather than replication. The hot new way to create high-resolution texture pack to fancy up old games is 'deep learning', feeding the original textures into a computer so algorithms can draw more-detailed versions of what they imagine the images look like.
