About TheLateGamer

Welcome to the website that is TheLateGamer.com. This site is dedicated mostly to giving honest reviews of triple-A games that have been released over 6 months ago, hence why TheLateGamer. Once all the hype has died down, and paid endorsements have ran out, I take over in ensuring these games are given the relevant credit they deserve. So prepare for some hard truths, hidden gems, and possibly a few laughs.

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

Oscar Wilde, The Nightingale and the Rose

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I’ve always been socially behind playing games, even as a kid. Whilst everyone had a N64, I had a SNES. Once the PS2 came out, I was lucky to get my friend’s old PSone. There’s no need to feel sorry for me though, as I’ve had some special gaming moments on these machines, and would not have been able to appreciate them as much, if I had been playing those games at a younger age. Perhaps. But time has since gone by, and with growth comes a job (on the side of studying), and with a job comes money, and with money comes a decked out, futuristic, ambient lighted, no room to move, apartment with all the toys a lad could want 😀

So even though I’ve now got practically all the more recent consoles, PS4, PSVita, New 3DS, Gaming PC, etc., I’m still only playing games from 6 months to a couple of years ago on these machines. “Why’s that?” I don’t hear you ask. Well to begin with, these games are quite cheap in the second hand market or in Steam’s solstice sales. Humble Bundle has dropped a couple of AAA games on the cheap, and for anybody who owns a PlayStation console, you need to invest in PlayStation Plus, the service is a gold mine for games only a couple of months old.

Which leads me onto the second reason of why I’m TheLateGamer. Snapping up all these games on the cheap has now meant that I’ve built up quite the backlog of games, that just seem to take forever to complete. Having to fit my gaming lifestyle around work and 3D printing, in which games I like to normally play consisting of RPG elements, which I try to complete as much of as possible. I’ll play games that slow me down with side quests, backtracking for achievements, and downloading any story dlc that are available. So a game like Borderlands 2 with its numerous quests, playthrough modes and dlc, that most casual gamers get out the way in about 35 hours by only completing the campaign, I’ve played 190 hours so far. In that time, a casual gamer could have completed 4 other games. Don’t get me started on the amount of time I’ve spent on Skyrim and Fallout. It’s a good thing I’m not much of a MMO player anymore. I think all I played for an entire year at one point was Battlefield 3 Multiplayer.

Now, I’ve find over the years that around 50% of games that are hyped up with all these positive reviews by distinguished “gaming journalists” turn out to be complete rubbish. This is of course like anything in life – movies, books, food, etc. but for games, it’s critical that they are reviewed properly considering that games can take up the most of our valuable respite time. The problem at the moment is that publishers are spending more on marketing than development of the game, which is resulting in games of garbage quality, being made out to be the next best thing. I’ve been burnt many times, paying full price on release day for this “brilliant” experience, only to find its a brilliant flop.

Even the big-wigs know the game industry is saturated in bull waste. Titanfall, that’s just been released, has been given the marketing slogan “Believe the Hype”. They’ve called wolf too many times before, and it’s now come back to bite them on the ass, having to stress that this really is the game that gamers want to be playing. Yet plenty of products have been failing to meet expectations, which is why we need to send out a message for real improvement in quality, and protest with our wallets.

We should all become ‘late gamers’, purchasing the game when it’s devalued to a price we believe the game to be worth. It’s not like you’re going to miss much over the 6 months you might have to wait for it to be in the next Steam sale. Plus if you want to double check whether the game is still worth purchasing by that time, that’s when you come to TheLateGamer.com to read my honest, late reviews. Even though you could ask if I may be biased towards my favourite genres in gaming, I assure that I play all sorts of games with an open mind, to help find a game’s real strengths and weaknesses.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy what TheLateGamer.com has to offer.

The Late Gamer,
A.K.A Samiby

(July 2015)

PC Specs:

*Above links Amazon affiliated.

(November 2019)