Beautiful and busty babes in video games have always been one of the biggest fantasies of any hardcore gamer. From the inception of Lara Croft's... magnums in Tomb Raider to many of today's digitized vixens, they provide a lot of much needed fan service while playing our favorite games.

The December issue of Playboy magazine proudly brings to us its top picks of today's most vivacious women in video games. The feature article "Playing Rough" is actually the fourth annual tribute the world renowned men's magazine has published for gamers to drool over.

Read the list of luscious women from Playboy's picks right after the jump!

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?