a question though, how will playing online affect my internet/bandwidth usage??
I can't give you solid figures, but I can tell you that a trip to youtube will use a lot more bandwidth. The information being passed around is probably in the order of a couple hundred bytes every second. Without setting up a packet sniffer and actually measuring incoming/outgoing traffic for the game I can't tell you for sure though.
also, when i was testing out ICO, it told me that my IP is Invisible and i should use alloy, but that didnt work either, does it mean that i wont be able to host games??
You need to open port 6112 on your router. There are guides lying around on how to do it (varies based on your router), so I'm not going to repeat them. Google "port forwarding" and you should find the details you need.
and finally, what is this latency and ping terminology and should i be aware of either of them??
Latency is the time it takes for data to go from one person's computer to another. A "ping" is a way to measure latency, by sending a signal and asking for a reply, then timing how long it took to get that reply. I personally think ping is horribly overrated as a measure of performance.
