heroineimages:

Lady Soldiers from XCOM: Enemy Within

I’ve meant for a while now to offer a writeup for the XCOM
games for a while now. My brother picked it up a couple years ago, and I
was immediately impressed with the armor designs for the women soldiers
in the game. Unlike other science-fiction based games, where skin-tight
catsuits and shorts with unzipped jackets over tube tops are considered
effective combat attire, ALL of the armor in XCOM
offers full body coverage for both male and female soldiers. I picked up
a copy from a Steam sale last week and found myself infinitely
addicted.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown and its expansion Enemy Within
are turn-based sci-fi strategy games featuring excellent squad-basted
tactical combat on various urban and wooded environments. In Enemy Unknown,
players are in charge of the XCOM Project, a secret multinational
organization formed to combat an alien menace responsible for abductions
and experiments on human subjects across the globe. The Enemy Within expansion
adds a new level of story and challenge with the addition of EXALT, a
secret organization aiding the aliens and attempting to undermine the
XCOM Project. In both games, players recruit, manage, and deploy elite
special-ops units against alien invaders while studying captured alien
technology in order to better combat this unknown menace. As the game
progresses, players are able to research and create improved weapons,
armor, and facilities to better equip their soldiers.

All screen captures taken from game play. XCOM was produced by 2K Games and developed by Firaxis Games and Feral Interactive.

(Click for full discussion)

It was particularly great since that X-Com’s original game was pretty awesome for not just female armor but also diversity in general.  Soldiers were hired with randomly allocated names, nationalities, gender and stats.

I am very pleased that they have maintained this tradition – unlike some other games attempting to emulate the original.

– wincenworks

For this week’s bingo, let’s take another look at something that comes from Leap of Faith. Ouch, that one must really hurt!

An… interesting thing about the design is that the lore apparently explains the painful metal bits growing into her flesh with a demonic transformation:

Lost amid the ruins following Blackburn`s Uprising, a black book finds its way into the hands of an Elvish conjurer. The transformation begins as she embraces the dark power growing within.

Okay, so the body horror aspect of sharp metal jammed in her skin is the result of the book’s dark power, I can buy that alright… How does that explain why conveniently she gains an underboob, though? Other than the “evil is sexy” principle, I mean?

~Ozzie

Oh I’m in awe all right (NSFW Link)

Oh I’m in awe all right (NSFW Link)

salsathegeek submitted:

I stumbled across this in a search for some images to use for tokens in a PBP Pathfinder game. Needless to say, when I saw the title of the stock photo, I thought my eyes would roll out of my head. I’m linking it instead of posting the preview pic because the image is pretty much porn in all but name. (If it’s intent is to solely elicit sexual arousal, it qualifies in my opinion, and theres no way whoever set this up didn’t have that as priority numero uno.)

Anyway, I’m going to get back to looking for an image I can use to represent a young hellknight in training.

Well this certainly beats the super perky boobplate we found on Shutterstock before.

And there I was thinking that stock photo libraries were supposed to title and tag their resources in the most precise and truthful way possible, so that people can, you know, easily find the kind of image they’re looking for.

How foolish of me to assume such thing.

~Ozzie

Putting the image (titled

“Awesome young woman in ancient armor on grey background”)  under the cut, for the record:

image

Oh I’m in awe all right (NSFW Link)

Oh I’m in awe all right (NSFW Link)