I am crossing over to the dark side

[MT2008]

There's a gun buy-back program going on in my city, and I have decided to turn in all of my firearms and ammo for some basketball tickets. Guns are horrible, evil, and dangerous, and I want to get rid of mine so that I can become a tree-hugging, wine-sipping bisexual.

Just kidding. But I have finally decided that I want to buy an Xbox 360, mostly so that I can play the "Gears of War" games. Since I haven't been big into gaming (especially consoles) for the last 5 years, can anybody recommend whether I should buy the Arcade or the Elite version? Is there a difference in how they run those games? Or is it really just the memory for storing files? Bear in mind that being in graduate school means I probably won't have much time to play games (just on the weekends), do I really want to pay $100 more for the Elite?