I’ve seen and played part of the future of Xbox Live: Community Games. It’s a feature whose success relies on almost everyone but Microsoft.

Community Games is the recently announced program that allows independent developers to publish games created using Microsoft’s XNA Design Studio toolset. Gamers will be able to download these games through their Xbox Live account on a regular Xbox 360.

Microsoft allowed me access to the Community Games beta, where I proceeded to download more than 10 completely user-created games.

The current Community Games interface doesn’t work well. It runs through the existing XBL interface, which XNA general manager Chris Satchell told fellow reporter Tracey John will change later this year.

“The beta is definitely not how it will look when we launch later in the year because we have to work with the current technologies; we’re releasing more stuff later in the year,” said Satchell. “So it’s a little bit cumbersome to get through in the beta, and we’re definitely ironing that out by the end of the year.”

Interface issues aside, Community Games relies on the development community downloading Microsoft’s toolset and creating new experiences. In that respect, there are already some very interesting things being done with titles already published on the beta service. They’re all rough and unpolished, but many show promise.

It’s not that surprising the majority of the games are shooters. It’s the genre people are most familiar with on the Xbox platform and, from my understanding, a genre that’s one of the easier to have up and running in a very basic form.

The first Community Games title I downloaded wasn’t a shooter, though. It was a music game designed for…babies. Titled “Baby Gamer Musical Rain,” up to two players take control of a dancing dog as musical instrument boxes drop from the sky. Touch the box and that instrument adds to the music. The unnamed creator claims the game will eventually recreate “original music based on modern jazz theory,” but in its current state, it’s just a different kind of music game.

Of course, with no baby hiding in my apartment (that I’m aware of), there’s no way to test “Baby Gamer Musical Rain” on its ultimate promise.

My favorite shooter was “Rift.” At first, it doesn’t appear much different from the average “Asteroids” or “Geometry Wars” clone, but there’s a strange charging bar at the bottom. That bar manages your time-alteration powers. With the click of a button, all action on the screen stops — but you can still move and place bullets. When time is reinstated, those bullets go flying in real-time. I’m excited to see where “Rift” takes that concept.

I also played others. There’s “Doppleganger,” a “Defender”-like shooter that switches up the formula with instantly switchable parallel fields of play, “Nano Race,” a “Tempest”-looking racer that feels a lot like Harmonix’s “Frequency,” and many others. It’s early, but there’s a bright future for Community Games.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on the 12 on my hard drive, to see where development takes them. And here’s hoping many more stange games make it to the service.

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