Critique please

[cheat-master30]

Okay, where can I start first? Well for one thing, as said, the seperate categories thing looks pretty silly, and while you have a good amount of forums (a tad too few, but a good amount), you should put them into broader categories, maybe like this:

Gaming (fancier name needed):

Battlefield 2
Guild Wars
BF1942 DC

General Chat

General Chat
News Feeds
Introductions

Tech News and Tech Help Desk

[what you have under that]

This also moves general chat down, and the forums for your topic up which means more people will see the interesting discussions rather than the chit chat first, and possibly be more likely to join and post more in the topical forums.

I also think you do not need a forum for arcade improvements; have a topic in general discussion which is stickied and the links/downloads manager thing should instead be a bold link in the navbar or something rather than a forum redirect (it's a key feature, and should be treated as such I'd say).

Next, make less forums private. You need search engines to see the interesting content for it to get more known, and guests like to read what's there before they join. Also, fill in the posts in any empty forums, last post should NEVER say 'never'.

I can't say much about the style, other than it fits the theme I can see in the site, so well done. Yeah, some people here don't like it, but it's topically fitting, and in my opinion appeals to gamers.

You do need to make less of the forum members only though, maybe keep some things like actual downloads and stuff members only to encourage them to join rather than the whole thing? I can't comment on your blog system usage because of this.

Finally, you have a nice array of smilies, so well done on that, and in case I didn't imply this, well done on actually keeping down the number of forums, since a lot of people make hundreds of them when their site is brand new and it overwhelms the visitor.

[K4GAP]

All points being considered, thanks.

[cheat-master30]

No problem, although I'd say that style itself is fine.