Tough Love X

First off, I'd like to compliment this joint on their web design. Not only does the black-and-red color scheme evoke the proper sense of dread and menace that I think a site named Tough Love X deserves, but it is also quite easy on the eyes during late night masturbation sessions to boot. Admittedly, I wouldn't have minded a few more browse-tools, but for now browsing by series seems to do the trick.

Speaking of which, despite the site being only 10 months old, it has already produced content spanning 7 separate series. This isn't just any random mishmash of content, though. Each series centers around the wacky antics of the site's own protagonist, a mustachioed ruffian known simply as Karl . . . or Dr. Karl, sometimes even Father Karl, depending on which series you're partaking in at the moment.

The series with the most episodes by far(19 at the time of this review), however, is Karl's World, which seems to focus primarily on all the hotties he picks up via more conventional means — if anything that crazy bastard does can be called conventional. But Karl, modern day renaissance man that he is, would never have been satisfied with only one method of conquest, let alone one kink. Which is why we have series like Karl's Casting(4 episodes), Dr. Karl(8 episodes of Karl pretending to be a licensed psychiatrist), and, my personal favorite, the bondage themed Tough Love(6 episodes). Oh, and with new episodes are coming in on a weekly basis, you can expect these numbers to have grown considerably by the time this review has been published.

With a site like this that obviously doesn't take itself very seriously, you might expect slap-dash productions. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I was surprised by how well crafted some of these scenes were. The lighting is always on point, clever camera angles are taken advantage of, and it is not uncommon for a scene to have multiple voiceovers to give us an idea of what the character's thinking during key moments. And someone is obviously putting in a lot of work on the scripts, because we're usually treated to a good five minutes of Karl's insanity before the action commences.

But don't go thinking they spent all that money on fancy cameras and lighting crews. The model roster says otherwise. Karl has already made use of 44 porn stars, including real hot commodities like Avi Love and Riley Nixon. I can't wait to see who he does next.

Getting back to the content, each scene can be streamed or downloaded in 4 different levels of playback quality. The highest being a great looking 1080p HD MPEG-4, and the lowest being a handy 360p mobile file. Streaming went off without a hitch, and direct downloads clocked in at a very impressive 8.8 megs-per-second.

There really isn't anything in the way of niche tags, but each scene comes with a multi-paragraph synopsis, presumably from Karl himself, painstakingly detailing the action. They also threw in screen cap galleries, and a full-fledged photo set you can download. The images are clear and crisp, and feature a nicely sized resolution of 2,000 x 3,000 pixels.

Well, you've heard the good, so now I suppose you want to hear the bad, too. Well, to be perfectly honest, there really isn't a whole lot to complain about here. I already mentioned the lack of browse-tools, but it really is difficult to fault them for that considering the site is still quite new and as such doesn't have enough content yet to justify them. And perhaps that is this site's only crime: a mere 138 scenes coupled with a total lack of bonuses could certainly make the current rate of admission seem awfully steep to some. But considering the fact this site is producing such high quality original content, I'd say it's a bargain.