My brother bought the XBox live beta kit a while back for something like $49 USD. And it came with a headseat thing, service for a year, and a couple of Games, and then when it was fully released he got the regular starter kit in the mail.
It's an ok service. Sometimes you can't even tell your playing with people online, if people's bandwith is good. I hear that it's better than the PS2's online system... But who am I to say anything i rarely ever play the damn thing...hehe
No lag, player matching and ranking. It has been pretty smooth in halo 2. Except I suck at that game. I've always like PC stuff better but I really like halo. Can a wireless controller hurt my chances. I Have the logitech wireless controller.