Monday, January 01, 2007

Free Xbox Live Trial Gold Membership and Classic Xbox Live Content


We'll, it seems that Microsoft is offering free one month trials of their Xbox Live Gold Membership to anyone who creates a new Xbox Live Silver Membership on their Xbox 360. According to some posters on the Xbox Forums, this is only valid for the first 3 accounts created on an individual console, and I've created 2 accounts on mine. The first is my main account which didn't offer me the trial as I mentioned in this post here, and the second is my test account. What a pain in the ass the set up was for this, though.

When I went to create this second dummy account, I decided to try the path of creating everything from scratch from my Xbox 360, and while I had no trouble getting an account name on Xbox Live, creating a Windows Live ID account was just stupid. I tried over half a dozen account names, some of them really dumb combos of words and numbers, and according to Xbox Live, they're all taken. I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that llllleditiontokkaabd1239@hotmail.com is taken. Ultimately I just used my personal Sympatico email account (thankfully I merged it with MSN some months back, so it's recognized as a Windows Live ID account) to get things up and running.

The strange thing is that after creating this dummy account, I was able to sometimes log into Xbox Live through the classic Xbox titles I was trying using my regular Silver Membership account, something I was unable to do before and could not repeat consistently. Not sure why, but whatever. I was able to download the Halo 2 and Doom 3 Bonus Maps I wanted, and more importantly, the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Yavin Station Content.

I also found some bugs with the Xbox emulator for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. There's some artifacts that appear around certain text in the main menu and in-game menus, and there's also some white/blue lines that appear in various character portraits and under the main game screen's Action Menu. It's nothing horrible and doesn't effect gameplay or really even take away from the improvements in the game's visuals, but it's worth note none-the-less. Another strange thing is that if you download the Yavin Station Conent and don't have or don't create any save games, the Xbox 360 HDD will no longer recognize the game as "SW:KotOR" and will instead list it as "Unknown Game," even though it's still displaying the proper Darth Malak icon. Once you start and save a game, however, this issue seems to resolve itself. Anyway, I've reported all this to the Backward Compatibility team, so perhaps they can address these issues in a future emulator update.

Once February 1st roles around, I'll call up Xbox Support and delete my dummy account since I'll no longer need it.

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