"Had I not played that Sega rally racing game there's a good chance we would have been killed" 

Ex-presenter of GameSpot's video shows, Rich Gallup, praised the life-saving lessons taught to him by an unidentified Sega arcade racer in an edition of the site's regular random brain dump, GameSpotting. The one-time host of On The Spot and Button Mashing wrote about a serendipitous series of events (including something about a man sticking a straw into his own ear) that rescued him from "easily the scariest" moment of his life. We've extracted the most dramatic part of the ordeal here:

"I noticed the stopped cars too late, and instincts took over. The minivan in front of us swerved to the left to avoid a pileup and we spun to the right, then to the left, then to the right, then to the left, then one last time to the right, and came to a rest in the breakdown lane... I can say without hesitation that if that rally racing game hadn't taught me how to properly control a skidding car, something terrible might have happened, and for that I am thankful."

For the whole convoluted story - and to find out why someone would purposefully stick a straw in their own ear - be sure to read the full account in Gallup's own words.

"A videogame that's helping kids deal with - and even beat - cancer" 

Re-Mission is a videogame created by non-profit organisation HopeLab to help cancer sufferers understand more about their illness, treatment and recuperation. According to cancer survivor Dan Neumann, playing the game was "a key component that helped him conquer his leukaemia". Sounds implausible? Here's Re-Mission featured on an NBC news report...

For more information head to www.re-mission.net.