Virtuagirl
Review
 The
site we're looking at today is old school by internet standards. They've
been around for quote a while, but I've never really checked them out
before. VirtuaGirl is a desktop application that has little stripper
animations running on your desktop. Because of what it is, I always
avoided them because I try to keep my computer running pretty clean
without resource-hogging applications like this running in the background.
Their current site, and the one we're reviewing today, is VirtuaGirl 2.
Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with the differences between this and
the previous version, but their site now has picture and video content of
the models as well as the desktop application.
I guess there's two parts of this site to look at. First, I'll look at
what put them on the map, which is their strippers on your desktop
thing-a-magic. I wasn't really sure how to get started, so I went straight
to the girls they listed right on their member's page. I found some
animations I liked and clicked the download button. After waiting through
a horrible 60KB/sec. download speed (of a 20 meg file), an error popped up
saying I didn't have the application installed yet. Doh!! I looked around
and couldn't find this application very quickly. I finally went to their
(free tour) homepage, and downloaded the demo. That thing downloaded
quickly at 600KB/sec!
Once installed, you can download animations. First, find the girl you
want. Then, realize that each girl has different outfits. I first clicked
the "download all" link thinking I'd get everything from that girl, but it
was just that one outfit. Find one you like, and wait through the slow
download speeds (although it did speed up to 150KB/sec a few times). It
installs itself automatically and you're ready to go.
The girls show up in the corner, right above your toolbars. There's some
options you can set in the program, such as which side of the screen, if
you want nudity, zoom, etc. to check out. Basically, these are short video
clips that overlay themselves on your desktop. The original size (which
was at 120% zoom I think) was a little small, so I enlarged mine. Even at
the biggest setting (200%), it wasn't huge. Sometimes there's some music
or a little talking, so disable that if you don't want it on. The girl
will dance around and strip, finally disappearing. You can set the
frequency of how often you want another girl to pop up, which is initially
set at every 15 seconds. The quality is ok, and it's so small you don't
really see any real details or anything. The one problem I ran into was
some transparency issues from time to time, with parts of girls or their
clothing being cut off. It'd also mess up already-open programs once in a
while with a shadow that never disappears.
For the photos, get ready for some monotony. All of the photos are shot
against a plain white background. Thankfully the pics are pretty
high-quality, or I'd get bored real quick! The pictures are large at
1150x750, and are very clear and colorful. There's only one set for each
girl, so hopefully you like it. There's also a zip download option which
makes getting them a little quicker.
The videos are offered in different formats depending on who knows what.
The first one I checked out had three formats available: Windows Media,
QuickTime, and Real Video. The next clip I looked at had three quality
options of a Windows Media file only. I checked out the WMV first, which
looked just ok. The video was 360x288 at 360kbps, but the quality just
wasn't there. However, on the video that only offered WMV, the
high-quality version looked better, even having the same settings. For
some reason all the clips that are offered in the different formats just
don't look as good (maybe they are older), while the ones just in Windows
Media look better. Some of the newer stuff, in fact, looks GREAT. I saw
only a couple clips in this new encoding, but they were upgraded to
700kbps+ !
About the only other thing to checkout are the wallpapers if you're into
that (which thankfully go all the way up to 1600x1200 for us
high-resolution people). My biggest complaint of the site is the server
speed. Browsing around the member's area was painful at times, with each
image on each page loading one by one by one, and it took forever. The
same goes for downloading any large files, which was also pretty slow at
times.
For $25 a month, I think this is a toss up. I personally don't like
running applications like this in the background, and the other member's
features just aren't anywhere near worth it for me. If you're into this
stuff, this is about as good as it gets since they've been doing this so
long. I just can't see paying a recurring fee for this, a one-time fee
would be better in my opinion. A repetitive, semi-low-quality girl dancing
around for a minute or so just doesn't do it for me. |
