Yes folks, today is officially Bungie Day throughout the world. Celebrate with your Halo lords by fragging a couple friends online in Halo 2 for either the Xbox or PC.

As a special gift, Bungie is putting up some special Bungie Day gamer pictures and a theme for FREE on the Xbox Live Marketplace on the Xbox 360. You read that right… FREE.

Make sure you grab these pretty quick, though. Once midnight hits, these puppies are gone forever. As in never available again. As in pray your Xbox 360 doesn’t die if you enjoy these because you won’t be able to download them again.

I was just thinking about this game when I heard that the international demo is slated to hit the US on July 20 and be up until August 3rd. It will weigh in at 1.1 Gb, which seems to be the standard for these kinds of demos and makes sense since it is rumored to have about 2 hours of gameplay in it, which isn’t shabby for a demo. So if you were thinking about trying out Blue Dragon here is your chance to grab up a preview on Xbox Live marketplace before buying it for full price. I want to get this thing hands on and see how it compares with Eternal Sonata to see which won will win my RPG play time.

Yeah, Microsoft screwed this one up again. Or maybe it was a combination of Microsoft and Ubisoft. Either way, it’s another overpriced error on the Xbox Live Marketplace which does not bode well for Microsoft’s image.

The Rainbow Six: Vegas Black Pack was released last week to a bit of an uproar, as it was available on the Xbox Live Marketplace for 800 MS Points ($10). It’s the same price as the previous Red Pack, which had much more to offer. After a couple days, the Black Pack mysteriously disappeared. Well, Major Nelson now sheds some light on the situation: the Black Pack should be free. Yes, free.

‘Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas Black Pack Downloadable Content for Xbox 360 Live was originally intended to be free content for the fans of Rainbow Six Vegas. We apologize for the error. All players who purchased the Black Pack will be reimbursed automatically.* The Black Pack will be posted Saturday June 30th and will be free of charge. Also, as a token of our appreciation for the Rainbow Six community, we are making the Red Pack free as of Friday July 6th as well. Thanks for playing and we hope you enjoy this free content.’

Glad the error is being corrected, although Microsoft is saying it’ll be 8-10 weeks to reimburse people who paid for the content. Giving away the Red Pack for free is a huge plus as well. I’ll be downloading these as soon as possible.

I am sure that my feeling of disapproval with pricing schemes in regards to gamerpics and themes on the Xbox 360 marketplace is shared. I for one like having different Gamerpics and actually try and switch mine up every once in a while as well as the themes, but I just cant see myself paying for many of them for a couple of reasons.

My main reason is that you can only have one theme set at a time and a max of two gmaerpics. This stinks in my opinion, why pay for multiiple themes or pics if you can only use one set at a time? If Xbox added a feature to rotate your different pics and themes I would certainly purchase more. Have it set so you pick like ten gamerpics and maybe 4 or 5 themes and have it rotate on a timed basis, kind of like your backgrounds on your computer and screensavers.

Also the pics and themes typically are overpriced, they are just small pictures, why make them cost so darn much? It does not take much to have them up and I do not understand how some are free and others are a couple of bucks? Either make them all free or make them a nominal fee, I would lean toward free.

The Xbox 360 camera pics should also be able to be saved as themes or allow users to use multiple personal pictures to be used on each blade of the in game menus instead of just having one on all. You can take a pic using your camera and make that your gamerpic, which is kind of cool but then that is one less purchased gamerpic you can’t use.

What do you think?

In what could be termed the most successful and widespread machinima series ever, Red vs. Blue will be ending it’s run today with it’s 100th episode.

The show has spanned over 5 years since the first Halo game came out for the original Xbox. It has been set in various Halo maps, across games (the dreaded void between Halo and Halo 2), and even in older Bungie games. The series has been adopted by Microsoft and is available on the Xbox Live Marketplace.

If you don’t want to see the show go, make sure to pick up the DVDs and other merchandise from their website.

Thanks for the laughs and good times, Rooster Teeth! Keep up the good work!

Its contest time again my people, this is kind of a miscellaneous prize drawing. Step right up for your chance to win a free copy of Contra, UNO, or Fuzion Frenzy 2 for Xbox 360. Top contestant gets to choose their prize from the 3 titles, second gets to choose from what is left and third gets the left over. I started thinking about this the other day and have been playing Contra non-stop lately and wanted to share my Contra love, plus we had a couple of extra games lying around.

Basically take the original cover art for the Contra NES box (below) and think of a funny subtitle for it. The more inventive the better, you can even alter the box art if you want to add to the funny or choose a screenshot from the game or even use any Contra related material. We will judge them on creativity, humor and effort. Happy blasting folks!

The contest ends at 8pm EST on Sunday July 29th, so get those submissions in.

Hit the jump for more…

Ok I consider myself a dedicated Contra player, logging countless hours in every single kind of Contra game imaginable. I have picked up playing Contra on the XBLA and have gotten every achievement except for the one that is awarded for beating the game with only one credit. No matter how hard I have tried I keep coming up short, it has become my latest obsession! I now have Contra on the brain and I’m trying to devise a plan to get this achievement. This is what sparked my idea for the Contra contest, details to be officially determined next week.

Any tips give me a shout. Must play Contra, must kill Aliens, mustn’t lose the spreader!!

After playing Contra again and beating it on XBLA recently, I realized just how timeless this game was and the fact that I have an extra Xbox Arcade Contra and UNO code just lying around. I want to share my Contra (and UNO)joy with our readers and will be putting together a quick Contra contest to give away my extra Contra code. Stay tuned for details and let us know if your interested.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the latest Xbox 360 demos on Xbox Marketplace, shame on you, we here at Loot Ninja highly reccomend you do. With the new ability to download while playing games and leave your system on overnight while downloading there shoudl be no excuse, unless you filled your HDD with music. There are some quality demos available like:

* Tenchu Z (Some stealth ninja action for ya)
* Forza Motorsport 2 (A bit of racing to get your engine going)
* Shadowrun (Elves and dwarves killing in the name of…)
* Overlord (Just added today, get your evil villain on)
* GRAW 2 (If you liked GRAW one, take a look)
* Command & Conquer 3 (RTS + bombs = Nice)
* Winning Eleven Pro Evolution Soccer 2007 (GOOOOOOOOOAL)

That is a decent lineup for demos this month, many of which just came out this week, so if you were on the fence about grabbing a title, take it out for a spin and feel it up first. Each demo is around 800 Mb to 1 Gb in size and retails for 0 rubles, my favorite sum of cash.

Ok let me start off by saying that this update was way overhyped for what it brought to the table. It has some nice features, mainly the downloading functionality has improved, which is real nice. You can now download demos and things while playing games, I was playing MLB 2k7 and downloading the Forza Demo. There is also a new blade for the market place, which should shave a few seconds from finding it the old way.

The other main feature that everyone was waiting for was the messaging feature and let me say that I am thoroughly underwhelmed. I see no point in this feature other than leaving messages for people while they are playing games, but you could already do that. I tried the messenger funciton out last night and it is a bit of a pain to set up, and typing with the soft keyboard stinks! I guess this is negligible if you have a USB keyboard, but I think people will much prefer to use the new Microsoft TID device (mini blackberry on your controller).

What I really want to see for the next update would be group voice chats. That would be a real nice feature to have since sometimes you want to talk to some buddies in a group instead of flipping back and forth from private chats. Come on MS hook a brother up!