If you got a 2-month card with Mechassault 2, you might as well use it & rent a few Live games to see how you like it. I gave it a try, and my trial period runs out in mid-March. My experience:
Unreal Championship - OK
This is a slower, harder to control port of UT2003. Supports up to 16 players, but those games can get really choppy. The sweet spot seems to be around 6-12 players. Not a lot of fun to play without the insta-gib mutator on, since it’s hard to kill someone due to poor aiming control, 200-unit health, and internet lag. Makes CTF far less fun when you can’t kill the flag-man.
Burnout 3 - Impressive
Played very well when I tried it, the initial problems compained about in the beginning seem to have been resolved. It’s a pain in the ass to make a separate EA registration.
Mechassault - Blah
It might be a great game, but eveybody was playing something else when I tried it. Only 2 games were going on, and the fellow I was playing in a 1-on-1 match with eventually got tired of handing my ass to me and quit.
Outrun 2 - Blah
Again, nobody was playing. Somehow in all the articles I read about Live, it never got mentioned how long you might have to wait to find someone to play with. MS advertises “theme nights” for Live, but I don’t live on that schedule.
Star Wars Battlefront - Impressive
This game was built from the ground up to be a multiplayer game, and it seems more fun on the Xbox than on the PC. I’m getting more and more impressed with Pandemic.
Midtown Madness 3 - OK
There are a few players out there, but the artificial barrier on the outside of the game world really annoys me, especially the way it cuts across streets and removes avenues of escape.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Nobody’s playing!
Crimson Skies, Whacked, & Project Gotham Racing 2 - Haven’t tried them yet, best get on it…
The downside of Xbox Live is that if you aren’t operating at the “grand master” level in a game, you aren’t going to have a lot of success online. If you equate fun with winning, you’ll have to pick a game and stick with it. I like to dabble and never really become a top-level player at any game before I lose interest & move on. Thus, I’m still on the fence as to whether to fork over $50 to MS come 3/14.