Secondhand smoke is terrible, but good luck getting away from it when you visit an internet cafe in China. In recent years, restrictions on smoking have been passed on locations such as restaurants and net cafes, but even so, people still smoke. Now, in China's city of Wuhan, the authorities are cracking down.

In the West, China's net cafes get a lot of bad press—often only getting ink when a gamer dies or a fight breaks out. But as Kotaku's Beijing-based writer Eric Jou reported, they're not necessarily bad places.

Internet cafes dot the Japanese urban landscape and offer a moment of pause for regular folks. Ditto for criminals.