Read part 1 here.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, link. The second tier includes lesser known and slightly more specialized sites, as well as the guys who do nothing but point to everybody else. For some reason, even when a site is dedicated to only linking other sites' stuff, no one seems to catch it all, so once again you have to pick and choose the right combination. Or find a sap to dig through all of it five hours a day. I should reiterate that I'm just naming off what I personally used in creating newsposts every day. I realize there are dozens of well-known websites that I'm skipping over, but apparently I got along without them.

"Second tier" doesn't necessarily refer to quality, of course. Some of these sites are much worse than that.

The Flesh of Fallen Angels! Continue to look out for the patented Horror Vision™ icon, letting you know that at least one element of a site's design is an infernal engine of the Netherworld powered by your tears!

For We Are Many: Digg

Remember the part in the old Carmen Sandiego game show when the host would stick his head out the door and ask Rockapella what the word on the street was? Replace the host with you, and replace the charming a cappella quintet in primary color '30s throwbacks with the writhing mass of psychotic red ants from SimAnt's lose screen, and you understand how Digg works.

Commander Keen confirmed as secret character in Final Fantasy XIII! Yes! Digg! DIGG!!

I guess most items show up there eventually, meaning you could theoretically use it for your news needs. But it's not actually much of a time saver because you have to read each article to know whether the headline is accurate or if Bobby No Thumbs just wanted to direct some traffic to his Geocities page. On the plus side, the teeming masses are sometimes good for catching obscure things, often a thread on some forum or an article on a small-time website, that would've escaped the attention of other sites.

Just don't read the comments. For God's sake, don't read the comments. These are the kinds of people who read my World of Nintendo catalog and responded with gems like

I find it very hard to believe that Nintendo, the company that removed blood from Mortal Kombat, would produce a catalog that talks about your girlfriend "leaving a wet spot" on the couch.

Fake - No Digg

JUMPING JESUS INSPECTOR YOU CRACKED THE CASE

All Purpose Nerd News: Blue's News and Slashdot

Blue's News and Slashdot have both been around since the Internet was made of twigs and mud, so they must be doing something right. Blue's News is more PC focused, with a small sub-section on console news, but they are a good source of new previews and interviews about PC games if you're really into that sort of thing. The one thing to note about them is that they just copy the headline of the story they're linking to without any editing, and sometimes said headlines are sensationalized, exagerated or just plain wrong.

Slashdot only has a new item or two per day on average, but they occassionally had something I missed elsewhere. To be honest, that's the problem I have in recommending any particular site on the secondary tier -- almost all of them had something "occassionally," but none of them are necessary or even good well-rounded sources of news on their own. The only way to really get any use out of these sites is to put them all in a big folder and read them all together, but that's going far beyond what most people are willing to do. I don't know anything about del.icio.us or any of these other bookmarking and tagging websites, maybe there's something out there they can combine all their feeds into something useful.

Otherwise, just assume a "sometimes interesting but in no way vital" comment on pretty much every site on this list.

Where the History Comes From: Eurogamer, British Gaming Blog and Computer and Video Games

After extensive tests, I have come to the conclusion that I am not European, so these sites weren't of terribly great use to me. But Eurogamer is one of the biggest video game sites in the UK, so this is probably a place you want to keep tabs on if you happen to be from that place over there. With the tea.

British Gaming Blog unfortunately doesn't update very much, but it's a clean design filled with big screenshots and their own hosted versions of various gameplay videos and trailers.

LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS THAT ARE MOVING PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THEM Computer and Video Games wasn't even on my list of sites, but I'd get linked to it regularly enough. I put it here solely so I can complain about this Godforsaken design. It recently took the title of worst "multimedia experience" you'll see in the gaming news circuit, ever since MTV's all-Flash site experiment came to a blessedly quick end.

The title banner cycles through images of several stories, a news ticker scrolls above it, there's a Flash ad above that, there's another block Flash ad in the middle of each category page, and every single page of the site has a video player to the left side running some useless thumbnail clip. Right now it keeps looping the camera pull out of the bus from the Fallout 3 teaser trailer, which would be completely meaningless to me if I didn't already know it was from Fallout 3, in which case I have no need to see it. Adblock to the rescue again.

The Nintendo Fun Club: Infendo, 4 color rebellion and Go Nintendo

Infendo is the Fox News of Nintendo reporting. They've even got the same sort of slogan intended to make them sound even-handed in the face of their rampant bias: "Intelligent passion for all things Nintendo." That bizarre compulsion some people have to ally themselves with a corporate entity is in full effect here, with "I told you so" smirks behind every new report of the Wii's success or the PS3's troubles. When the real world isn't providing the juice they need, they'll skew some statistics or evangelize Nintendo Christ's healing of the crippled game industry, possibly while masturbating, to provide that all important jolt of self-righteousness. And then, sometimes, they just make a post with a picture of poop on it.

4 color rebellion has a more light-hearted approach, going less for the "I MUST CARRY REGGIE FILS-AIME'S MANSEED" tact and more the "gee Nintendo games sure are swell aren't they?" path. Still fanboyism, but less aggressive and aggrandized (and, as such, less aggravating). If you still play your NES more than a 360, 4cr is probably your site. If you own a "Know Your Roots" t-shirt with an NES controller on it, you're probably a Hot Topic poseur and need to drop out of a window.

Go Nintendo avoids both options by being not much more than a Nintendo infodump with little to no commentary either way. In fact, if you only came here for Nintendo news, this might be your best surrogate, with tons of screenshots and links to IGN, Gamespot, Game Videos and Game Trailers. In fact, the one downside may be there's a little too much updating.. I'm writing this right now in the afternoon of June 5, and posts dated for the 5th go back four pages already. But using the RSS feed would clear up that issue.

I should mention I also had N-Sider and The Wiire on my list, but I don't think I ever actually used them.

Forum Quorum: Evil Avatar and Something Awful

Something Awful's Games forum might be seen as a more intelligent Digg, with users submitting information but also being punished (through mockery or actual probation/banning) for stupidity and blatant misuse. I know there are people who have problems with Lowtax and/or the SA community as a whole -- hell, so do I and I've been there six years -- but thankfully little of that applies to subforums like Games. (Most of the idiots who define their lives by a message board stick to the general fourms.) While news can sometimes get lost in the shuffle, a forum is still generally the best place to follow events as they happen, find mirrors for recently released trailers and feeds for live conferences, and listen to 20,000 people analyze an issue and likely find something you missed.

The NeoGAF forums might also work for this too, but I've never used them so procede at your own risk.

Evil Avatar is really more of a half-way point between news sites and forums, with users submitting items that are then reviewed by an editor and posted. It's actually not a bad solution to the problem I had of having to find all the news myself. They do a fairly good job, with the one issue being that coverage is somewhat uneven. Someone might not work up a post on something until several days after other sites, and sometimes you get stuff posted as news that was talked about elsewhere six months ago.

Simple and Clean: Opposable Thumbs

I don't have a snazzy category to fit it in, just a poor Utada Hikaru reference, but I should mention Opposable Thumbs. While it doesn't update enough to be a "real" newsblog (and I don't think that's the intention), each post is intelligent and actually sounds like it was written by an adult. If there's commentary, it's almost always interesting and insightful. OT is an extension of Ars Technica, a long standing PC and general tech news site that I've always appreciated for being mature and in-depth.

I feel like I should counter this love-in with a negative to remain even-handed, but nothing's coming to mind.

Sites I Rarely Used... But Will You?

Text ads fit anywhere! Gamers Reports - An ugly website with too much text and those awful paid content links that pop up ads for crap with no relation to what you're reading when you dare to accidentally mouse over them. If you're looking for a website that does nothing but copy and paste press releases and link to articles you've seen elsewhere already, you can probably still find a better site for it than this.

Games Are Fun - A clean layout with a basic news column, and hey, games are fun, aren't they? Too bad they post an average of two news items a day, and both are usually several days old.

FiringSquad - A PC gamer site with all the hardware reviews and performance tests that go along with it. I must admit, my interaction with this site was limited mostly to occassional features and marvelling at how Goddamned big graphics cards are getting.

GameDaily Biz - The industry news section of Game Daily, and GameIndustry.biz's American doppelganger. As such, many things get repeated from GI, and since I always checked GI first, GameDaily didn't usually have much to tell me. But obviously I can't hold that against them, so if you like GD's design better or you prefer an American focus, by all means, consider them and GI.biz interchangable.

That's it for today. Next time is the final installment, with all the little niche sites that fill gaps only nerds can appreciate.