Thoughts on a Tuesday afternoon…

• There have been some good reads in the gaming press lately. Kotaku’s Leigh Alexander, who’s quickly becoming one of the more engaging writers in the biz, offers up a thought-provoking piece on how and why we defend gaming, and about how we’re often going about it the wrong way. Over at IGN Insider (if you’re a subscriber), a site that’s not exactly known for deep thinking, David Clayman and Michael Thomsen churn out a terrific piece entitled “The Death of Hardcore Gaming”, and at that bastion of game-related journalism, the… um… Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz raves about Grand Theft Auto IV while noting that he served with “The Godfather”, he knew “The Godfather”, “The Godfather” was a friend of his, and GTA IV’s no “Godfather”.*

• Thomsen pens another piece at IGN, “Contrarian Corner”, which deftly tackles Metal Gear Solid 4 in a spot-on piece that’s sure to ruffle the feathers of serious fans… even more so because he’s got series creator Hideo Kojima’s laborious style-over-substance modus operandi pegged. Further driving the point home is The Escapist’s Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, who basically says all the things about the MGS series that I’ve been dying to… but I’m not on a late-night cable network and don’t have the same obsession with bodily fluids.

• Microsoft’s cutting the price of the Xbox 360 - or at least, they will after E3, according to retailers who weren’t down with Microsoft’s whole “we’d like to make a splash at E3, so keep this under your hats, please” plan. The “Pro” mode (1,000th friendly reminder to Microsoft: you have way too many models here!), which sports a 20-gigabyte hard drive, will drop to $299 dollars, $100 less than when it was released. More importantly, Microsoft has apparently fixed its nightmarish digital rights management (DRM) problem, in which gamers who had their faulty Xbox 360 units replaced couldn’t use the content they downloaded off of Xbox Live without first getting approval from a Microsoft server. The software fix (the Content License Transfer Tool) is a day late and a dollar short, but at least it’s here. A better overview of the process can be found at Joystiq.

* Bonus points for those who know who inspired my summary of Díaz’s article… and yes, I’m aware it was a stretch.