Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Oopsee

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

A couple of people mentioned to me yesterday that the scores (and associated oh-so-snazzy graphics, which btw I made myself and are Creative Commonsed like the blog) had disappeared from the blog. It turns out that, in the process of removing the ‘e acute’ character from every mention of Pokemon (RSS programs didn’t like it), I copy-pasted the final draft of the review before I put it on the site and added the graphics. Mystery solved :)

How game scores are calculated

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

To go with my review of Pokémon Pearl, here’s a quick explanation of how the ‘overall score’ for a game is calculated.

Each game is assesed on five areas - Gameplay, Graphics, Sound, Lifespan, and ‘Opinion’ (how fun I think the game is, independent of the other four comparators). The game gets a mark out of 10 (with half-point mark intervals - 7, 7.5, 8 etc.) Obviously some are more important than others. The weightings are as follows:

  • Gameplay: 50%
  • Graphics: 20%
  • Sound, Lifespan, Opinion: 10% each

New Reviews category

Saturday, August 4th, 2007

From today (or maybe tomorrow, depending on how quickly I can write the first one :P EDIT: It’ll be tomorrow (Sunday), would rather do it properly than quickly) I’ll be posting reviews of games and the like on here. Not just ‘Game A sucks’ or ‘Game B rocks’, but proper full-length reviews. It will originally stick to games, because they’re the only subject I have scoring criteria worked out for at the moment. I plan to expand it to books, albums and other such things if I can come up with viable scoring criteria.

IMPORTANT: Unlike professional reviewers like PC Gamer, Gamespot and so on, I only get to review games I’ve actually bought in the first place. So that explains why you might find the reviews to be generally positive - if a game is a total lemon then (hopefully) I won’t have bought it in the first place.

Now hosted on Wordpress.com

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Well, although the appearance hasn’t changed at all, this blog is now hosted on Wordpress.com. You may wonder why I’ve done this. There are several advantages actually:

  • No need to manually upgrade software
  • Servers automatically backed up, and load-balanced. Much less chance of downtime
  • No bandwidth constraints
  • Other such things

With the exception of category feeds (only affects the Planet Wikimedia aggregator) no links have changed at all. The category feeds have changed from http://davidarussell.co.uk/category/wikimedia (or whatever) to http://davidarussell.co.uk/tag/wikimedia (or whatever).

Oops

Friday, June 8th, 2007

I just discovered why the site was taking so long to load. When backing up (for a potential move to MT) I had made the front page display 1000 posts (I was fiddling with templates to get htaccess redirects). I hadn’t changed it back to the usual 10 when I restored Wordpress. Like I say, oops :)