Dark Cruising

The thing you need to know about this site is that you can sign up and register for free, but you will need to buy tickets, as the site calls them, to view the videos. So this is a kind of pay as you go site. That means that you can control how much you spend here, and there are no membership fees, or recurring fees hanging around in the background. So, register, login and what do you find?

The first thing I found was that the moody black background of the tour pages continued – actually this is the same as the tour, more or less. I found a top menu that worked well and took me to all the paces I clicked into nice and quickly, I found that I could put the site in five different European languages, which is handy if you don't read French, which was the default language when I called in. You’ve got recent movies features on the home page or you can head over to the videos area where you find the full set, and these are arranged across easy to navigate index pages.

When you star to view a video you are given a choice of viewing in Flash or in Real Player, there are also options to add a scene to your favourites area, but I didn’t see a link to this area in the top menu. You’re told how long the scene runs for and how much it costs. I saw some movies of around 20 minutes costing four tickets, and some that cost six. You have a choice of how many tickets you buy in one go, from five at $6.99 to 100 and $59.99. Naturally the more you pay the better value you get – go for the 100 tickets option and you've got a four ticket movie for around $2.36 (as opposed to $5.59 for 20 minutes of viewing if you go for the lower purchase). So, check the cost, check your account and click to play, that is to stream only. If you've not got enough in the bank you'll be told, and getting more tickets is simple enough.

As for the videos themselves, the quality is fine. I’d seen some trailers for Dark Cruising which were great even at full screen and these were only trailers, but I do suspect that the faster your connection the better. I wasn’t able to find out the actual size of the Flash or Real screens or their resolutions etc. but it was good enough in terms of visual quality. It was strange that there was no gallery area. I hunted around but didn’t see any images. On other sites from this company you've got zip files to download and some pics to view on line, but the only pics I found here were the samples for the movies.

I checked the model index where there were plenty of gorgeous and rough looking hunks, cute jocks and European twinks – though not so many of them as the guys here are all hard and tough. With each guy I found only a sample pic, links to his appearances and his name, so it’s not a very detailed or informative model index. I didn’t find any interactive options either, though there were good category lists to the left which will help you find your movies.

And as for final thoughts: there are links to ‘chat’, it’s a third party site and you may need to pay more, I noticed that the videos came from well know European (and other) studios, such as Triga and Cazzo, you've got details of the DVDs, you can apply to be a model and there are links to help, support and the newsletter. But I never did find my favourites area.