casual gaming has exploded in the past few years thanks to the iPhone and other smartphones, gaming has existed for decades already, with companies like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft being at the forefront of the gaming industry with their current and upcoming home and portable dedicated gaming consoles. Of course, if you are a gaming aficionado of any kind of device and like to stay up to date with news about your favorite systems and franchises, you only have to search the web to find the latest news about them. Note: Here are some nice tutorials for the PS3, the PSP and the PS Vita. Make sure to browse the site for even more of them. But if you are a real fan of gaming, reading gaming news barely cuts it. Instead, what is really fun and entertaining is to interact with gaming forums and communities who share your interests and who also have access to some of the most recent news and announcements in gaming. Let’s take a look at these two forums to learn more about them and how they stack up against each other as essential tools for serious gamers.
NeoGAF
Easily the most popular gaming forum out there, NeoGAF was created more than a decade ago and now harbors more than a 100,000 members. However, this number is not large at all, especially if you consider how old the forum is. The reason for this is the stringent rules that the forum adheres to when accepting new members and for regulating existing ones. Some of the most appealing features of the NeoGAF forum are its news-aggregating style (which favors the most relevant and popular topics), the amount of news that break there, the breadth of topics covered and the amount of industry members who post there, which can provide great insight into some key aspects of the industry. Registration is completely free, although getting your account approved on NeoGAF can not only take months, it also requires you to register with a non-free email account, like your work email or one from your educational institution for example. This keeps registration numbers within control, ensures that people registering for an account have at least a bit of commitment and it also allows for easier moderation, since someone removed from the forum will have a much harder time trying to get a non-free email account again. The quality of the news and conversation is usually top notch and you can find updates on most topics all around the clock. And there you have them. Both of these gaming forums are great, but I found that people usually don’t know enough about them to choose or to compare them on the fronts that matter. Still, both of them are free and each sports a great and passionate community. Even better, you can browse both at ease and get a feel for which one suits you best. And if you know something important about them that I might have missed, feel free to share it in the comments below. Happy gaming!
