Slashdot | Court on Video Games:  Less Cleavage, More Carnage

John Landis said, “R is when you bare a woman’s breast, PG is when you cut it off.” That is apparently now also the law of the land regarding video games, according to the Supreme Court’s June 27th decision (PDF) overturning a California law that banned sales of violent video games to minors. I’m glad the Supreme Court struck down the law, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that even though I agreed with the majority’s conclusion, the actual arguments made by the dissenters made more sense, primarily because of the hypocrisy of the majority in treating sex as more taboo than violence.

Yeah, because that makes perfect sense…

Upgraded my computer last night…  Went pretty smoothly.  Didn’t even try to do a fresh install of Windows, so I didn’t run into the problems I did with Terri’s computer.  Although I did forget to plug power in to my optical drive, so that isn’t currently working.  But that’s an easy fix.

Had to re-install Divinity II afterward, even though I didn’t touch my hard disks.  It was looking for some remnant of nVidia PhysX software I used to have installed, before replacing that video card with an ATI.

It’s absolutely amazing how different the game looks.  Everything is genuinely unfamiliar.

I was playing on basically the lowest possible settings.  Turned everything down or off.  No shadows, no HDR, no light shafts, nothing interesting.  And now I’m playing on extreme settings.  It looks gorgeous.

The lighting is much more interesting, more complex.  Everything isn’t just flatly lit from some mysterious source.  Instead, things are lit from sources in the environment.  Sources with different colors and textures and intensities.  Sources that can be blocked, and cast shadows.  The world isn’t just shinier, or more vibrantly lit…  It isn’t just that there’s more polygons and more vegetation and random objects…  The whole environment is much richer.

It’s very hard to describe just how much different the game looks now…

Outside of gaming – surfing the web, playing music – I’m not noticing much of a difference.  The soundcard works fine…  The network works fine…  Disk access is as quick as it ever was…  It’s all more than sufficient for my day-to-day tasks.  But, then again, so was my old machine.