Complete disagree with you here. Like any form of art, it's completely subjective. I much prefer the original to the filtered version. I can totally understand people not liking pixel art, but saying it has no artistic value seems ridiculous.
That's what they are pretending; not that it has none.
And this is for games where immersion is one of the priorities; those micro-squares just make think that my monitor may be using some low resolution settings and doesn't help a little bit to the credibility.
Resolution and all other superficial realism measures do not add anything to the immersion capacity of movies or games. Just take any black and white Hitchcock, and tell me you are not immersed in the story. But what can be further to realism than black and white?
I'm not old enough to have played these games when they were released. Nor am I likely to have played them if I were old enough. But I do understand that realism isn't necessarily the aim of art and find pixel art beautiful independent of its nostalgia. Perhaps age isn't the estimator you're looking for?
24 but that's not a honest question. I have played and completed hundreds of old adventure games (almost all of them look pixelated) including Monkey Island 1, 2, 3 and 4 in their original graphics using a DOS emulator; the first two are the more pixelated and are far better than any other of the following but there is a reason why they decades later recreated the first one using less pixelated graphics. Those were the best for the engaging characters, puzzles and comic situations and it has little to do with the low resolution they have.
It still means you grew up when pixel art was well past it's heyday. Yes, I'm sure you've seen lots of it, but when you give examples like Monkey Island as an example of "old adventure games" (which as a genre in itself is a bad place to look at to learn about pixel art), to me that explains why you do not appreciate it.
Monkey Island is cartoon-art constrained by low resolution, but with weak enough constraints that the art did not have to be tailored to the medium all that much any more. We saw that transition begin with the advent of the 16-bit machines, where though there are some outstanding examples of pixel art, is also a lot "just plain art" that just happens to be pixelated - the visual quality had gotten to a stage where a lot of art was no longer specifically made to exploit the constraints of the resolution and colour constraints.
And this is what pixel art is about, like chip tunes and 1K demos and what-not: Making art to constraints. A lot of art is made to artificial constraints, some more stringent than others.
Bach spent a huge amount of time and effort composing within the heavily stylized and specific constraints of the fugue, for example. Not because he had to, but because he wanted to: The constraints guides you towards certain types of solutions that you generally would not pick otherwise.
A lot of famous painters have done many of their most famous works within the confines of specific constraints (some defined by themselves, some by others) of style and form.
Pixel art is a form of art very distinct from "just" low resolution bitmap graphics.
It is generally easy to pick out vs. images that originated without the typical resolution and colour space constraints of the medium, and has been scaled down etc . Of course there is a blurry line in art made in low resolution, but straddling the line towards "just art" by not making use of the older techniques.
For many types of pixel art you can even identify the platform it originated on by visual cues that go beyond basic technical constraints like colour choices, constraints on colour changes and into indirect constraints such as specific shading techniques and archetypes that occur in the images because they work well within those constraints.
