The nice thing about the summer game lull is that it allows players to clear up the backlog or try some games that may have been overlooked in a more crowded environment. Microsoft is currently pushing its “Summer of Arcade” promotion in an effort to highlight some top-tier downloadable games that are being released over the next month. It’s an interesting tactic – Microsoft won’t move any significant number of of consoles because of the promotion, but should be fairly successful in generating revenue from existing users. If the company was trying to push just any old Xbox Live Arcade games right now, the promotion would fall flat on its face. Fortunately, the Summer of Arcade is built on some of the best downloadable games around, starting with the excellent Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2.
As the built-in leaderboards showed, I was far from the only player obsessing over Geometry Wars 2 last night, but the actual gameplay is only part of why this title is so fascinating. The release of this game has a lot to stay about the state of the games industry as a whole. Read on for more:
