Last Monday I wake up to do exactly what lots of other people did... turn on my Xbox and get the new update for the dashboard.

Although the rate system and the avatar customization options were reasonable good additions, what really had my attention was the "Games on Demand" section.

When I first read about this new possibility, I was concerned about the type of games and titles they were going to put in this "sale bin"... I was worried about getting there only those titles that were really impossible to sell in the stores.

To my surprise (and to many people as well) the titles were pretty good... Mass Effect, BioShock, NFS Most Wanted, NFS Carbon, Call of Duty 2, and others in the same league. Unfortunately, most of them are already in my collection but nonetheless I got one of them (COD2) just to see how fast the download was... And it was fast... I left my Xbox downloading at 10:30 in the night and by the next morning the game was downloaded and ready... Much faster than expected and definitely much faster than waiting for it in the darn mail... And only 30 bucks... not bad... not bad at all!

Bottom line... I think this might (and should) be the way ALL games are delivered... the era of the plastic case and disks are over...

Last weekend I was going over my RSS feeds when something caught my eye... there was an article stating that surgeons who like to play games (lets call them gamer-docs), were noticeably more accurate in their interventions than non gamer-docs.

Apparently,those surgeons who like to play games and do so for periods of three or more hours get far better results than non-gamer-docs.

I went to read the actual study (from the NY Medical Center) it was quite interesting.

Study

So that made me think about how would I react if I see my doctor playing Halo or Gears of War in the surgery room immediately before cutting me up... mmm... what would I do?

Well... I DO think that gaming improves your eyesight and your eye-hand coordination and surgery is mostly about that so probably I'd have no problem with that... hell... I'd probably ask him to hand me the controller for a while (just to calm my nerves down of course)...

But, What would other people do? What would my mother do if she sees something like that?.. Probably she will get the hell out of there running half naked thinking that there is no way in this earth some lunatic doctor-gaming-freak will touch her...

This little piece got me interested so I looked for other case-studies... and guess what... there are a lot of them and about all states the same... gaming is good for doctors who perform very delicate operations... some med-schools are even planning to use Wii's as learning tools for their students.

Anyway... this proves something very important...

VIDEO GAMES ARE GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH...

What do you think of it?

Today I was checking my feeds and among the ones I've got from ARSTechnica (one of the best technology sites I know), I found one talking about a new gamer community site called raptr (raptr.com).

Immediately I clicked away and went to look at it... here is what I found:

The base idea looks promising... to have a cross-platform, cross-game, cross-everything community that interacts in real time using other social networks like twitter and facebook as vehicles.

The site is supposed to know in real time the moment you are playing a game in XBL or even your PC and immediately notify your friends so they can join you...

Obviously you can also upload your game collection, maintain a friends list and give any game a score and a review.

You can also download a client to your PC or Mac and have some additional functionalities even if you are offline... mmm... interesting.

Looks good and it can evolve into something better... I'm giving it a try.

Don't worry Gamespot... I'm not changing you guys... but this thing can be a good complement.