GayGeek

Does Buzz West deliver what it promises on the outside?

Buzz West was a staff photographer for Dirk Yates(.com) so he has experience capturing the San Diego military recruits that have made Dirk Yates and All Worlds Video a recognized brand in the world of porn. Dirk Yates has now retired, selling out to Channel1Releasing, so Buzz is branching out with his own site and style.

That said, a closer examination of BuzzWest.com reveals a mish-mash of content; some new stuff newly produced by Buzz for his new site, some older stuff carried over from DirkYates.com, and some filler pages of photoshoots which have become almost public domain.

The tour of BuzzWest generally mirrors the members area, so you can get an exact idea of what to expect. To see what is truly unique to BuzzWest.com; select GENRES-BUZZWEST EXCLUSIVES. These newly produced exclusives represent about 30% of the content of the site. Or, select GENRES-MEN OF DIRKYATES, to see what has been carried over from Buzz's days at his former employer. The carry-over content from DirkYates.com represents about 35% of the content of the site and is of a lesser quality than the new stuff. The remaining 35% is photo-only content of models you have likely seen before.

What's good about Buzz West? What needs improvement?

The exclusive content which Buzz has newly produced are quite good; crisp and clear in detail, and represent the new standard of quality which is sweeping better pornsites right now. It will be right up your alley if you are into military stud-muffins. The same cannot be said for the carry-over content from DirkYates, but new content is being added at a fairly fast clip, so the hope is that there will be more BUZZWEST EXCLUSIVES as time goes on.

The carryover content from Dirk Yates has many of Dirk's failings; fuzzy video quality, vidcaps substituted for photos, and generally lackluster production. I was a Dirk Yates fan for many years and always wished that Dirk would wake up, get the camera off the tripod and give his zoom lens a workout. Over the years, Dirk managed to make hundreds of bland, lifeless videos of really hot and gorgeous servicemen.

All of the video content is DRM protected in a strange way that results in a "right-click prohibited" pop-up window in three pre-selected sizes which plays an embedded WMP which can't be brought to full screen. Since the videos were already DRM protected, I wondered why not just launch in native WMP so that we could control the size ourself. A good thing was the videos come across pre-indexed so that you can instantly click anywhere on the status bar to play the video from that part forward - a great plus for slower connections and those that can't wait for the finale.

I tried downloading a few of the videos and due to the DRM protection, they could not be opened once on my hard drive because of an SQL error from the license server. This rendered the video downloading feature useless - leaving just the 3-size pop-up window to watch or not. Many of the videos were not available in all 3 sizes, but the sizes are displayed as a choice nonetheless, which made navigation a trial-and-error experience. There were also model's pages which had no video content, but the VIDEO option was shown anyway (again with the three sizes).

The photos in the photo galleries are also displayed in a pop-up window - again available in three sizes, but the larger sizes did not provide any slide bars if the enlarged photo was bigger than my screen size. This seems like the site was not tested very well before production.

How is Buzz West unique?

BuzzWest.com is about 28% unique due to his new, exclusive content. The newly produced stuff is good, high quality, and worthy of all military fans' attentions.

Let's hope that Buzz continues with his frequent updates and builds the site so that it is made up totally of his newer works.