Last night, Microsoft announced The Summer of Xbox Live Arcade, a program that will see the release of a new Xbox Live Arcade game for Xbox 360 every Wednesday for the next month or so. Early this morning, the first of those games, Frogger, was released. Four more will follow: NinjaBee's Cloning Clyde, Namco's Galaga, Capcom's heavily anticipated Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting, and Namco's Pac-Man. Last night I got the chance to check out those games, and here are my impressions.

One option available only in Player matches of Street Fighter II' is called the Quarter match. This game type allows a lobby of up to five players, two of whom face off at a time while the remaining players watch and wait to play against the winner. Here, Capcom is attempting to provide an online proxy for the time-honored arcade method of play, in which the player who wins the most gets to play the most. It's also a nice way for a group of friends to hang out online in a game that generally only accomodates two players at once. Quarter matches are distinct from ranked matches and a Quarter session has its own leaderboard that tracks the performance of each player through the matches.