If  you bought the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Maps on Day 1, you may have been affected by an outage.  Modern Warfare 2 was not yet updated in order to allow the maps to be played.  In the end, you may have received a message on Xbox Live from Microsoft themselves stating the following:

“To thank you for your loyalty to Xbox LIVE and for buying the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package on day 1, we will extend your Gold membership for 7 days of adrenaline-pumping action with your friends on LIVE. Your account will be updated on May 1.”

Well thanks Microsoft!  Wait, what are you actually kicking me back?  A standard year of Xbox Live Gold costs around $50.  Seven days is only worth around 95 cents.  However, many time people will find cheaper cards on Amazon and those run about $35.    So  for me, I just got 67 cents back.   I think I should just mail MS a dollar and say “Thanks, but no thanks.”  I mean, whatever happened to free arcade game day for their screw ups?

That’s right, the Blur beta I was telling  you about a few weeks ago is now open to all!  Simply head over to the Xbox Live Marketplace listing and click to get it queued up to download to your own 360.  The other news is that recently the Blur Beta expanded itself from a level 10 cap to a level 15 cap allowing an expanded look at cars and other power-ups.

Why not take a look for yourself?  Blur is being described not only by it’s creators, but also by the people playing it as Mario Cart meets Project Gotham Racing.  Of course, it could be they say this because the developer MADE PGR!  See for yourself!

This is the grill prop that everyone who did the Xbox Live Block Party received.  However, the code is pretty universal so why don’t you download it  yourself?

9XBX9-9RCD9-9BCK9-9PRTY-9RCKZ

-UPDATE- This wouldn’t work for me last night and I suspect it won’t work for many of you either.  The code entered just find but when it was downloading it stopped and gave me an error message saying “Couldn’t download grill prop”.  I had plenty of room left for it, so I am just assuming MS had something in place to prevent this.  Sorry Folks!

Right now if you head over to Fileplanet you can get signed up for the upcoming Xbox 360 beta Blur. I know with all the things going on with Activision right now, not many people are probably interested in what games they have coming out. However, when was the last time you heard about a racing game from Activision? I can’t think of any, can you? Hit the jump for the details behind blur, but don’t forget about going to http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/blur/ to get signed up as you don’t need to be a subscriber right now. Hurry up as the beta starts on March 8th, just days away!

Thanks to all three of you that entered the little giveaway. (No sarcasm, I mean it!)

The winners are Cyberspartiate and Element. Both have been e-mailed the code. If you want something, you’re gonna have to bug them about it now.

Thanks and stay tuned, I’m always getting codes I don’t use.