On the texture: Where some people see something to bitch and moan about, I see an artist trying to cleverly create an illusion with what limitations he/she has. Even though the engines are getting more powerful, game asset creation is still a difficult task where you need to pull out a lot of little tricks and hacks to fake shit. Joe Blow Gamer usually has no idea what he is looking at and believes that is light hitting a wall/floor. The illusion works until you get right up on top of it, which is true of a lot of game art.

I'm with you on the other crap, especially the pre-rendered stuff still being shilled as gameplay -- but this scenario is so old and whatever we call something beyond cliche. Cliche x10? I dunno.

If by limitation you mean Gearbox discovering the game they had farmed out was unfinished shit and they had 4 months to scramble putting together something for the deadline where the only goal was having the game not explode your system into flames, then yeah they accomplished what they set out to do.

But out of all the games to skimp on atmospheric lighting (something every other game has gotten right for almost 10 years) with cheap effects you'd expect in a 1950s movie, Aliens was not one of them.

What I am trying to make clear is that every game artist has utilized this texture trick to fake lighting and will still likely utilize it well into the next generation. The fact that someone noticed it this one time in a mediocre game is not an indication of the devs fucking up, being cheap or utilizing the video game equivalent of "1950's movie effects".

Otherwise I am on the same page with being completely disappointed, but it isn't because of an art technique utilized by every 3D game in the last 10 years (and the next 10 years to come).