For those not in the know, Playboy has been running a yearly nude (or sometimes semi-nude) portfolio of hot video game characters for three years now. According to Scott Alexander, Playboy's Senior Editor, this is their way of injecting the video game culture into the magazine (read: getting the geeky hardcore gamers into buying Playboys).

Now, this year's Playboy Women of Gaming photo spread features nude female characters from different games gracing the front of the Playboy Mansion. Included in the list of virtual hotness are the following characters:

• Sarah Morrison from Tabula Rasa
• Jessica McRae from Scarface: The World Is Yours
• Lida and Persephone from God of War II
  
• Alica Claus from Bullet Witch
  
• Dr. Jasmine Lin from TimeShift
  
• Enrica Villablanca from Splinter Cell: Double Agent (Wii, PC, Xbox360)
  

Sorry to disappoint you guys, but we don't have pictures of this year's photo spread. And the one pic we got (see image above) was cut out from the neck up, which, I really don't think we even have to explain to you why it was cut that way. Alexander explains further that good old Hef (Hugh Hefner, THE Playboy guru himself, for those who don't speak Playboy lingo) has always been a hardcore gamer. Hmmm...interesting. We've always known the man as a player, but as a gamer?

Apparently, Hefner even has a high-profile, real techy game room in the mansion which has everything from pinball machines down to the latest gaming whatnots (we wonder if he already has a PS3 and Wii in there?). Alexander says that combining video games and Playboy is the perfect move for the magazine because "the demographics for video games are a good match with the average Playboy reader..." and that "...tech is a huge part of men’s lives. The constituency of gaming and Playboy are almost exact."

So if you've got the hots for sizzling virtual babes (and you are of mature age, and it's not illegal in your state, and yada yada), you can check out Playboy's Women of Gaming photo spread and satiate those voyeuristic cravings of yours. A shame though, Samus didn't make it to this year's spread. Maybe next year?

Because work on a PC game is never really done, "technically speaking". Patches, the benefit - or the bane - of PC gaming, depending on how you look at it. But as one of our more veteran and respected writers said, well, at least the devs are on top of it. So today we bring you, from each respective publisher, update patches for Ubisoft's Splinter Cell: Double Agent for the PC (you're not going to be using this on your 360's Marketplace, folks), and Lead Pursuit Inc.'s premier F-16 combat flight sim Falcon 4.0: Allied Force.

The SCDA patch will bring the game to v1.01. Ubisoft's correcting a few anti-aliasing hiccups in this first update to the PC Double Agent, but mainly it's focused on fixing multiplayer problems such as invitations, squad features, and disconnect issues. Because nothing's more irritating to Splinter Cell multiplayers than a spy with the critical, score-counting data suddenly disappearing from the game, along with your chances of winning.

And now from the shadows to the skies, we have the 1.0.8 patch for Falcon 4.0. Anyone who's played this game knows that it's as close to the real-world F-16 as you can get, short of signing four years of your life to the Air Force, or entering the Academy. Still, little tweaks here and there only mean that the game gets even more real than it already is... is that even possible, even for Falcon? We have two downloads available. One is for v1.0.7 owners, the other is for owners of lower versions that need more stuff updated.

Now, since 1.0.8 tweaks even more game code than Congressmen tweaking the defense budget, we're keeping the changelog in the full article. So read up while you hit the download link.

Download: [Falcon 4.0 v1.0.7-v1.0.8 update]
Download: [Falcon 4.0 v1.0.8 update for earlier versions]
Download: [Splinter Cell Double Agent v1.01 patch]

Falcon 4.0 changelog at the full article. And negative, Ghostrider, the pattern's full.