Microsoft had some Xbox Live troubles and downtime during the holiday season, which isn’t something that users are going to be happy about. Microsoft has heard the comments about the downtime and they plan to offer a free download of the Chair Entertainment title, Undertow, free of charge to help attempt to satisfy unhappy Xbox users.

Microsoft says that they were not as ready as they could have been for the increase in usage during the holidays, which caused some customers to experience intermittent issues with Xbox Live during the holiday season. Microsoft does say that Xbox Live was never completely down at any point, but that they were disappointed in their performance.

Microsoft says that the free download of Undertow will take place on January 27th from 2 A.M. to 11:59 P.M. Undertow itself is a single player, story-driven campaign-oriented aquatic shooter with both on and offline co-op modes of play. Undertow supports multi-player for up to 16 players.

It is good to see Microsoft once again stepping up to the plate and trying to keep gamers happy, and of course, this is a good thing with the market tightening among Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, who has been continuing to make in-roads with the Wii, which has been leading the sales numbers as of late. The bottom line is that Microsoft needs to keep gamers happy and the holiday season during the vacation break outages, even if they were intermittent, is never a good thing; giving out a free game should go a long away toward making gamers forgive Microsoft for the issues that they have.