In addition to the satisfaction of dragging that last bite of delicious popsicle off of its stick and the pride that fills your body after spelling your name with the trail of a sparkler, the summer months also bring about one other inevitable feeling: the emptiness of not having many videogames to play.

For some odd reason, publishers like to release all their major games at the beginning and end of the year, leaving the middle, extra sunny months a veritable gaming release ghost town: one filled with movie-licensed tumbleweed and dusty, shovelware saloon doors.

But there is still hope!

Today marks the midway point of the year, so what superior way to prepare you for the upcoming months of gaming desolation than with a list of the best videogames of 2009?! Using this list, you can start playing some outstanding games that either fell off your radar earlier in the year, or are ones you just haven’t had time to get around to yet. Whatever the reason, these first half of 2009 games should not be missed!

Grab a nice, cool glass of lemonade and hit the jump for a list of fifteen games we here at Destructoid think are worth checking out during this slow, lazy summer: our list of the best videogames of 2009 … so far.

Here they’re (in alphabetical order):

Bit.Trip Beat (WiiWare)

Bit.Trip Beat has no “characters.” It has no story. It might even have the most “basic” graphics of any game on a current-generation console.

But, man, the game is ridiculously fun.

Playing like a weird hybrid of Pong, Rez, and, I don’t know, Dance Dance Revolution, Bit.Trip Beat is a funky, one-of-a-kind, and mind-numbingly addictive experiment for WiiWare. Using the tilt controls of the Wiimote (no buttons needed!), players are asked to catch “beats” as they cross from one side of the screen to the other. The premise is basic, but seeing the way the game perfectly combines its lovely visuals with the outstanding music is exhilarating. You really need to play it to truly comprehend the game’s genius!

Choice review excerpt: “Bit.Trip Beat feels like an intentional deconstruction of videogames as a whole, with all forms of complexity stripped away in favor of delivering a simple, concentrated experience.”

(You can read the full review of Bit.Trip Beat right here)

Picked as a favorite by these editors:

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Wedbush Morgan’s report on the videogame industry seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. Yesterday, we spoke about how Pachter predicted that Sony would surpass the Xbox 360 in six years’ time, and today we have another nugget of gold from the analyst’s massive document — talking about how a hi-def Wii could seriously hurt the PS3’s comeback chances.

“In our view, if Nintendo can offer such a device by year-end 2010, it will be in a position to seriously damage Sony’s chances of a comeback this cycle,” claims the report. “We would expect publishers to support such a move, given that the cost of porting an Xbox 360 game to the new Wii Plus HD format would likely be lower than the cost of building a ground up Wii game (we estimate under $5 million).

“Should Nintendo be able to convince publishers like EA and Take-Two that the Wii Plus should be supported by the entire EA Sports catalog and by the next installment of Grand Theft Auto, it should be in a position to successfully convince consumers that the Wii Plus is the last console they’ll ever need to purchase.”

I’m sure many more stories will come out of this report, which is currently being scoured by bloggers all over the Internet for more crazy quotes from the industry’s greatest guessworker. What do you make of this one, though? Would Wii HD take the wind out of Sony’s sails, and would it mean we’d never need another console?

source Destructoid

It’s already been confirmed twice over that Metroid Prime Trilogy comes in a sexy box and is a hell of a deal — $49.99 for three Metroid Prime games on one disc for the Wii. That’s real talk.

The PlayStation 3 might will be chugging away in third place, but that hasn’t stopped industry analyst Michael Pachter from declaring that Sony’s black box o’ Blu-ray will overtake Microsoft’s beige box o’ breaking-all-the-time.

“We think that the PS3 will capture significant