Xbox Live – Selecting a Membership Level

Joe Brennan: Hi, I am Joe Brennan Jr. from progamer.com and today we are learning how to join Xbox Live. Right now we are going to pick the kind of Xbox Live membership that best suits us. Remember that in selecting an Xbox Live membership remember that you need either a credit card or a prepaid Xbox Live card in order to be able to get a full Xbox Live Gold Membership. You can get an Xbox Live Silver Membership but then you will not be able to play somebody online. You will have to upgrade to Gold in order to do that.

So, let's start out by redeeming one of the prepaid Xbox Live cards that we have bought at either the electronic store, the computer store or even the 7-Eleven which is where I have purchased mine. So, select Redeem Code with your left thumb stick. Press the green Select A button and enter a code. On the back of the Xbox Live Card, is a subscription code which you will have to enter in. Don't worry about capitalizing the letters as they appear on the code, on the prepaid card because the Redeem Code is not case-sensitive when you enter it into Xbox Live.

So, now that we have entered our code, we confirm that our card gives us a 12 month membership plus we get one free month. Select Redeem, hit the Select A green button and now we are going to have to enter our address. Now lucky for you through the magic of editing you didn't have to sit through actually inputing each of those, the address, the city, the state, the zip code. So we are just going to move on to the menu item, next hit the Select A green button, move to the next screen and now one of the most important parts of this entire process, picking the gamer picture that's going to be part of your gamertag on Xbox Live.

Now, it maybe a little limiting but let's face it. I think we have just about every bit of human character encapsulated in these choices here. I am not much of a panda person, I am not much of an angry monkey person. I am certainly not a dragon or a pink haired girl, so I think I am going to go with the cute Golden Retriever. Now we have to choose our zone, the type of gaming style that we are used to, Recreation which is somebody who is really just kind of casual, has a - plays the occasional game, Pro which is somebody who is fairly serious about their gaming but not quite at the fanatic level yet.

Family which is let's keep it clean, let's keep it honest. Let's remember that there are kids around and underground which is certainly not for the faint-hearted. This is as hardcore as hardcore gaming can get. So let's just take it easy on monkeyseeme2 and we will make them a recreational member of Xbox Live.

Here, is your opportunity to decide whether or not you want to receive promotional information, whether it be video clips or music or ads that will be automatically downloaded to your Xbox for demonstration purposes. We are just going to select No. We -- and also at the same time Partner Marketing we will decide whether or not we want to receive special offers from partners of Microsoft just for demonstration purposes, we are going to select a No on this screen and now we wait as our new membership is being created. Congratulations on your Xbox Live membership.

Now that we have picked the Xbox Live Membership that suits us, it's time to get into a little bit of multi-player gaming on Xbox Live.