I always get a chuckle out of the 1980's hair-band rocker metal hair cuts some of the men seem to have. Often, I'm not sure whether my Arena character wants to bang heads with a rock or head bang to some rock. The championship wrestling belt on the male armor, and the pose gives me a chuckle too. I'm not complaining. Arena was a product of a different era of videogames, a naive era, as illustrated by the thong toting woman on the cover. The Arena character designs do have a certain charm to them. It wouldn't be the same if they were all cool in a modern sense. I like old games, and Arena brings back a strong sense of nostalgia for the good old days.

I know alot of people seem to think that the first nord head looks like the governator

Oh yeah, I used that head for my first character.

Arena was a product of a different era of videogames, a naive era, as illustrated by the thong toting woman on the cover.

Almost everything seems corny or naive after enough time has passed. There was nothing particularly corny about Arena when it was issued, nothing that made you say, "Jeez, what were they thinking?"

The female you refer to is well within the Frank Frazetta tradition of fantasy art.

As for the hair, they didn't have a lot of pixels to work with, so the hair was a pretty good choice for a defining characteristic. That's harder to do for males, so the spiky look was perhaps more common that anyone would've preferred, but what can you do when you can't use manga-style eyes? BTW, speaking of manga-style eyes, are Arena's hairstyles any more ridiculous than Final Fantasy's?

I have no problem with the gratuitous T&A 90s PC games had. For the record, Arena and Daggerfall were both pretty tame in comparison to a lot of things back then.