At the beginning of last month Microsoft revealed to the world that they would be having a "Summer of Games" on Xbox Live Arcade.  While this pretty much amounts to every good game that Microsoft has been sitting on for over a year it does contain five solid weeks of game releases starting with Geometry Wars and ends with the infinitely delayed Castle Crashers.

The list reads like the five best games that came out over the course of a year, but instead Microsoft decided that it would probably be a better idea to release them one after another to try and force the game release starved gamer to swim upstream, drinking all of the amazing goodness that they can before they drown. 

This would have been the case if a massive amount of games that had been delayed from last year hadn't been released throughout the course of this, making this winter's line-up seem to be one of the weakest in years.  Microsoft's attempt at a "Summer of Live!" which interestingly enough starts roughly halfway through the summer and ends when people are starting to get geared up for the holidays, seems to be more an attempt at an older philosophy that people only want to buy games all at once and won't come back to the same place later for more good.

None of this has anything to do with the quality of games that are being released, as Braid and Geometry Wars 2 are just the start of the slide and already seem to be two of the best downloadable games that have ever been released on a console, and we are only halfway through the list.  The highlight of the entire event comes out at Two AM, this Wednesday. 

Simply stating the name Bionic Commando around any group of nerds aged 24 and up brings back memories of screaming in frustration at the TV, the importance of grappling hooks, and the difficulties of shooting Hitler in the face with a Bazooka while falling from great heights.  All of these wonderful memories have been packaged up in an up rezed game that fixes the few problems with the first one.

Braid is another example of games that have been long mentioned to be in the works but never shown up on XBLA.  The definition of an art house game, Braid brings both an obscurely beautiful and vague story to a world filled with quirky time travel and hand painted backgrounds filled with symbolism.  Any further description of the game really only further confuses matters as it is something that must really be played to be understood. 

The main problem with this "summer of games" is more that Microsoft seems to still be treating the downloading environment more like a retail store than what it is.  There is no shelf space that needs to be cleared to make room for more games; there is no shipping so games don't need to be announced to have a delivery date for the world, and there are no lines of people waiting to buy games the moment that they are ready as the game is always "new" and they don' have to wait two weeks for someone to trade it in to get it several dollars cheaper.  Games can go up when they are done, and have more content added on when the maker believes that it is time to do more with their creation.