JANUARY 2007 RE-VISIT

Well, as we said a year ago when we first reviewed this site and gave it a "6", we would have given it an "8" if we could have downloaded and saved the movies. So now that they've made it so you can download the videos--at least for most of the sites, for some reason Joy's site still doesn't allow it--we're bumping them up.

Pretty much everything else we said about this network, and Anna Miller's site in particular, still goes. The layout anyway is all the same. Anna and Bruce are two of the best-known swingers on the Internet and they've been running their site for going on ten years now. Folks, that's a hell of a record when it comes to being online. They've also worked with a lot of other well known amateurs. As for content, it's basically a lot of POV blowjobs, girl-girl action, and groups of people fucking in hotel rooms. Individual girls sometimes have a little specialty as well. Like Joy's peeing movies, Angelique's pregnancy, or Anna's forays into (very light) bondage.

When we re-visited the network this time out we took the time to add a couple of reviews: Teen-Swing (Brooke Anderson), and Angelique XXX (Angelique LeClair). Angelique's site doesn't seem to have been part of the line-up a year ago, but now it's one of the headliners. Brooke's site was probably our favourite just because she's so darn cute. Anna and Bruce, however, have by far and away the most content. Up to 411 videos now (32 hours of material), and 391 photo sets (nearly 20,000 pics). The video quality varies quite a bit, and not only across the network. Anna's videos range from 320x240 to 640x480 to 500x334 to an impressive HD format (though this was only available for a few of the newer videos featuring Naughty Allie). Some of the older stuff is in the process of being reformatted. Most of the new stuff looks pretty good, with a playback of around 800 kb/s and a decent screen size. And since it's not real professional film-making in the first place we didn't think it made too big a difference. The only complaints we had about Anna's site was that the diary was being very irregularly updated (roughly once a week), we wanted more thumbnails to go with the videos, and we thought her dogs still looked really overweight. Seriously, she should be getting them more exercise.

The network as a whole however is pretty darn good and comes at a nice price. Biggest disappointment this time around was the video quality and lack of downloads over at Joy's site. But now that they allow downloads on all the other sites we thought it was a good deal.

FEBRUARY 2006 REVIEW

Fuck! 

This is one site--well, network of sites--we really wanted to love. It's got so much going for it:

(1) Great girls! And best of all, great amateur girls. Which means you get a lot more messy hardcore stuff, personal interaction (each girl has a cam show), and personal involvement (the diaries are actually being maintained). This is all part of the "personality-based" philosophy of founders Anna and Bruce, who have been at this game for a while. 4Real Amateurs takes a number of formerly independent amateur/swinger sites and combines them into one package. So if you love amateurs, this is probably one network you've been waiting for.

The sites currently included when we visited were:

Anna Miller (4RealSwingers): her site not only has the most content (over 400 videos) but it's also the most developed in terms of extras. This makes sense since Anna (and Bruce) are the headliners here and they've been online the longest. Included with the usual selection of pics and vids are such neat bonuses as a cartoon of how Anna and Bruce met and an "Educational?" section with lots of information on the swinging lifestyle, sex tips, a travel guide, and even the odd op-ed piece. Call us a bunch of word-nerds, but we found this fascinating--well-written and intelligent.

Joy Jericho (Joy-Swallows): we did a review of this site a few years ago--now out-of-date--that you can read here. Joy is a French-Canadian chick with a hot body. Not married, but does lots of hardcore.

Taia Tyler: good-looking woman with great big (fake) boobs

Bianca Black (SwingingSlut): Bianca went and tried black and look at what happened! She never went back. Can you believe it? Lots of interracial action.

Swinger Girls: interesting concept of an all-girl reality porn site where the ladies (Anna Miller, AngeliqueXXX, and someone named Mandi who has apparently dropped out) pick up and "review" some lucky stud. "With our combined sexual experiences, we will explore the earth & leave no penis over looked!" Look out!

Bi Hunter: blonde amateur. Seems like she's the only one not taking any cock (the closest she comes is giving Bruce a foot-job). All girl-girl action here.

Claudia Klein: blonde teen who pairs up with Anna and Bruce a lot.

Brooke Anderson (Teen-Swing): super-cute teen mostly blowing and fucking her hubby Grant. Reviewed here.

Jessica Evans (EroticJessica): sweet married swinger. This is a newer site and didn't have as much content yet (only 12 videos). 

Nicolette: good-looking babe whose status is described as "Horny and looking." Oh well. Maybe she'll find Mr. Right in a motel room orgy somewhere. Again not a lot of content yet.

You can expect to see a fair bit of crossover among these sites as swingers tend to mingle quite a bit. And you'll also see the girls here getting together with other well-known amateurs like Naughty Allie and Sammy4U quite a bit.

(2) Lots of content! Not only do you get archives going back six years, but the network as a whole updates with new exclusive content daily.

(3) Good navigation! Usually we really hate frames, but the top menu here really works well. Moving around the different sites is fast and easy. And the search function worked OK too.

About this point you should be saying to yourselves "Hey! Sounds like this site is the shit! Why is it only getting a "6" out of 9?

OK, here's the not-so-good part.

The technical quality isn't that great. There's a lot of video, but quite a bit of it is camshow stuff, and you know what that looks like. And a number of the photo galleries are vidcaps from the camshows, which are even less impressive. When you do get real photosets the quality varies quite a bit. We thought a lot of the pics were poorly lit and focused, and some of the sets we really liked had pics that were way too small. Like 640x480 small. We said these pics were "much too small" over three years ago! And let's face it, the bar hasn't been getting lower. Some sets, for some girls, do seem a bit bigger this time (maybe 800x600), but there didn't appear to be much consistency.

We also didn't see much improvement in video quality. Most movies seem to come in .wmv or RealPlayer format, but the playback is just barely average at what looked to be around 400 kb/s. The videos are also quite short (a lot are 5 minutes or less) and sometimes a scene is divided into several chunks.

And, finally, the video is streaming only. You can't right-click to download anything. This is what we really meant when we started this review by saying "Fuck!" As in: "Fuck do we hate streaming video!" Even DRM is better than streaming! Watching streaming video is such a pain in the ass. Fuck! We can appreciate wanting to protect content, but . . . (1) most other amateur sites (and amateur networks) allow you to download their movies, and (b) as previously noted, this isn't super-high-DVD-quality video we're talking about. We're not sure they need to be this paranoid. 

Of course, going this route is ultimately a business decision. And maybe it's the right one. But we have to look at things from a consumer's perspective. And streaming video never makes us happy.

This is a good network, but it should have been better considering how much it has going for it. The technical quality issues we might have let slide, but the streaming video really hurts. We'd probably give these guys an "8" if we