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 
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:
From today (or maybe tomorrow, depending on how quickly I can write the first one 
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.
The recent switch to Wordpress.com has allowed me, among other things, to give Windows Live Writer another try. Sure, it ain’t gonna replace the web interface. Aside from the need to administer my blog (e.g. comment moderation), the ‘hot posts’ (etc.) lists on Wordpress.com are really good for finding stuff to read. That said, there are some times when I just want to write a quick post, and if WLW can do the job then it would make that sort of post easier.
EDIT: Bang goes that idea. Aside from its Technorati tagging plugin using different formatting from my bookmarklet, the post was filled with HTML acronym soup (e.g. ‘b’ instead of the XHTML ’strong’ that both flavours of Wordpress recognise). Bye bye WLW!
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:
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).