Playboy Magazine has long been an integral part of the self-realization of the male American heterosexual identity, or, to put it more bluntly, everyone remembers the first time they picked up a Playboy. Hugh Hefner (hereafter referred to by his most common moniker, “Hef”) threw art, culture, politics, humor, and titties into his satin-accented cauldron and came up with a winning formula that has given him a lifetime of opulence, extravagance, and lots and lots of blonde, big-titted pussy. Now you - yes, you - can embrace all that Playboy has to offer in digital form thanks to Playboy Plus, one of Hef’s many online ventures that he hopes will keep the Playboy brand alive and kicking long after his miniscule little heart has ushered its last blood cells from its nearly collapsed chambers. Playboy Plus - the “Plus” stands for extra nudie pics ‘n’ shit like that - hosts a wealth of nude photos and videos that adhere to that classic Playboy style we’ve all come to love; and access to the site will cost you $19.95 a month; not a bad deal, from the looks of things, but let’s look a little closer, shall we?

Pros:
The most immediately apparent benefit to being a Playboy Plus (a.k.a.: Playboy Cyber Club) member is the incredible wealth of original and exclusive material available to all members. Everything is split into sections - Playmates, Cyber Girls, Celebrities, Coeds, Amateurs, and Special Editions, among others - and essentially gives you access to the entirety of Playboy’s digital archives.

Content is added almost constantly, with new photo and video items arriving on the Cyber Club homepage every day. As the different updates are filed in the various areas of the site (those outlined above), it’s rather easy to forget about, say, the Celebrity section for a few weeks, only to check back and find the likes of Kelly Brook featured there. What a delight!

The photographic quality is, of course, simply beautiful and falls right into that well-known Playboy style we’ve all come to love. Nothing too hardcore here, folks, just good old fashioned vixens showing off their breathtaking bodies and gorgeous faces in lovingly lit and photographed frames. Even better, you can now download most new galleries in zipped archives. How convenient!

Not content with resting on their considerable laurels, the folks behind Playboy Cyber Club have recently added some High Definition video content to the site, providing members with videos that reach 1280x720 pixels and look very nice indeed.

Playboy is keeping up with Web 2.0 developments and the increased role interactive internet is playing in our lives and this is best exemplified by the recent introduction of the Playboy Wiki, where you can find out all sorts of info about Hef, the magazine, hundreds of Playmates and celebrity bunnies, as well as contributing your own info, should you see fit.

Cons:
Many of the older sections of Playboy Cyber Club, including all pictorials dated earlier than late 2009, feature navigation tools and page layouts that now look fairly old-hat; so, too, do the video and image items themselves. It doesn’t look like this will changed anytime soon, which is a shame, especially since the new layouts are so great.

Those of you who relish the opportunity to use a sophisticated search engine to narrow down your porn hunt will be disappointed to find that the only searching you’ll be doing within Playboy Cyber Club is courtesy of a Google-powered engine that doesn’t give you many advanced options.

The Cyber Club members’ area contains a number of advertising banners, promo graphics, and up-sell offers that ultimately might not cause too much distraction, but will certainly annoy most browsers at the outset. We’ve paid to be in this exclusive gentleman’s club, or at least a cyber version of it, so what’s with the barrage of commercial offers?

Those of you who have heard the name Kendra Wilkinson before must know that Playboy isn’t exactly the towering powerhouse of sexual expression it once was. After years of fantastic celebrity coups that found Marilyn Monroe, Deborah Harry, and Drew Barrymore all working for Hef in some fashion, always scantily clad, the famous rabbit ears have now focused most of their attention on reality television and pre-obituary documentary puff-pieces.

Conclusion:
Just when I had given up hope of Playboy rising from the realm of reality TV and overpriced, cheaply made, plastic merchandise items, along comes a revised version of Playboy Plus, now known as Playboy Cyber Club. Even if I didn’t explicitly state them in my past reviews of this fine pornographic institution, I have longed for downloadable zip archives of Playboy galleries and for High Definition videos that really show off how wonderfully sensual the models are when not rendered motionless by the photography. These changes to the Cyber Club, along with the huge back catalogue of fantastic vintage Playboy material, very reasonable membership price, and, of course, the untouchably exquisite Playboy models makes Playboy Cyber Club a very enticing online destination for Playboy fans both old and new.