Army stops handing out bras due to cut backs.

Now granted, I'm more of a Soul Calibur man myself, so I'm not really up on the Street Fighter Lore. But when Kotaku posted up this little blurb on a four year old Cammy figurine (slow news day I guess, but they're meeting their bewb quota), I was just left thinking. What sort of military outfit is Cammy working for? At least she thought to camouflage her legs:

Hot Alma? Yeesh.

Poor print magazines. They really are disappearing. When I started at THQ, I had subscriptions to no fewer than eight game magazines. There were great ones like GMR and Edge, and not so great ones like PSE2 and 'Cube.

Now I'm down to one, Retrogamer, which is a great magazine, but doesn't quite fill the vacume left by the shuttering of some of my favorite magazines.

So it is with a mix of sadness and hope that I read the mag weasel's excellent monthly write up of what are now mostly UK games magazines "Game Mag Weaseling".

This particular month was the usual insightful well written fair. Including his usual amount of "enjoy it while you can" gallows humor. The highlight this month was the cover of April 2009's PC Gamer Magazine:



Now that is a cover that make me wish I hadn't let my sub scription run out. I really liked the first FEAR games and have the expansions on Xbox, that I haven't gotten around to playing. I did play the FEAR 2 demo and had encountered this new "grown up" alma. In the demo she definitely wasn't as nubile as she appears in this cover, in fact she was creepy and emaciated, definatly not sexy.

But as I do when I come across an image that might make a good desk top background I decided to go digging for the original artwork. Sometime I get lucky, like when I tracked down the artwork for Titan Quest 2 on the original artists portfolio page (which sadly, I can't seem to find now to link to, but it was a really interesting site that had lots of information on how they put together the bullshots for game magazines).

Anyway, I couldn't find a good image of the PC Gamer render, but I did do my share of trolling through "alma is hot" message board posts. I guess there's a lot of naked, pouty lipped Alma running around at the end of the game, so there were plenty of low rez screen grabs.

Here's the "best" of the "worst":


























Really? Those lips are probably the scariest thing in the game.

Akiba-blog makes me laugh. Usually it makes me shudder, but then it makes me laugh.

For those of you who are not quite as unabashedly nerdy as myself, you may not be familiar with Japan's Akihabara, but basically it's this section of Tokyo that has long been storied among video game nerds as the greatest place in the world. I've read countless blog posts and features on nerd sites detailing the amazing and often times astounding retro gaming items that can be found here.

Based on what I heard on various podcasts after this years TGS, it sounds like Akihabara might be on the decline. Gone are a lot of the sweet mom and pop game shops replaced by Maid Cafes and Mega Electronics chain stores.

Still, if I ever had a chance to go to Tokyo, this would be a place that I would have to go check out. Towards those ends I have had the NSFW Akiba-Blog in my RSS feed. Akiba-blog is basically an "interesting news of the day" blog for the goings on around the neighborhood. I was hoping that it would help inure me to the ins and outs of the culture of Akihabara. I was hoping that it would give me a little insight so that when I did visit I wouldn't be totally lost.

But instead I have found that Akiba-blog is basically 10% interesting tidbits and anthropology and 90% reviews of Adult Anime and inside tips on where to score pornographic Manga.

The upside of this is the hilariously terse text that accompany NSFW images such as this. Here's a good example:

Manga of Girls' Internal Organs": Probably, Selling More than Expected
by AkibaBlog

An adult comic " Eroguro " by faith is a groce manga: scenes of crushing the head, internal organs coming out, arms and legs are cut off, being eaten after coming, dumping internal organs, etc appear in each story. As I reported, at a store in Akiba, a warning POP for its sample, "This Book is for Advanced People. Even to Turn the Pages of Its Sample, Be Careful" was out. On the 3rd, the whole 90 books that were out at a store were completely gone.

This stuff isn't really engrish. It's just more like the most emotionless translation possible. Most of this stuff is chilling. It's like...what the fuck is going on here. What am I missing. And then I just shake my head and laugh. But it does break up the monotony of the day a little when I see lines like "Yosuga no Sora: The Power of Small Boobs & Wearing Only a Shirt" scroll across your RSS feed reader.

Anyway, browse if you dare.