Welcome To My Blog

I see you've wandered into my lair. Perhaps you arrived here via my work on Flixist, or my community blogs on Destructoid or Gamasutra. It might even be that you're a friend of mine, desperately trying to make sense of this strange fellow you've fallen in with. Mother never warned you it would end like this. I mean, begin. Obviously.

Well, here's the rub: my name is Xander Markham, I'm a 26-year old English writer with a borderline obsessive passion for films, videogames, television, incomprehensible words and indefensible puns. Although I've been writing as a critic for the better part of a decade and an aspiring spy fiction novelist since leaving university, this is the first honest-to-goodness project I've attempted entirely on my own. So what can you expect to find here? Much of what I've been doing elsewhere, meaning reviews, features and opinion pieces on all things screen-related, alongside more personal bits and pieces and some fun stuff just for the sake of it. There will be a bit of crossover with my work for Flixist - where you should go immediately after reading everything here - as I plan to post links and snippets to any reviews or features I write for them, alongside anything else worth being aware of.

So enjoy your stay and please visit again. By golly, together we can build a better world. Or just a really good blog. Whatever works.

FOLLOW ME ON FACEBOOK

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER

FANTASTICALLY APPROPRIATE DOCTOR WHO QUOTE

Jamie: Have you thought up some clever plan, Doctor?
The Doctor: Yes, Jamie, I believe I have.
Jamie: What are you going to do?
The Doctor: Bung a rock at it.

What's The Score?

Given how a fair chunk of this blog will end up being occupied by reviews, there needs to be some sort of scoring system so that when everyone's shouting at me for being unfair on their favourite game or film, there's a quantifiable measure of how irrational I've been. The problem is that different scoring systems suit different media: on my Destructoid blog, I reviewed games on a ten point scale. On my university newspaper, I scored films on a five-star scale, whereas on Flixist, we review films on a 200-point scale. Television reviews often don't get ratings at all. So where do we go from here?

It was tempting to either stick with Flixist's system, unifying the two sites, or go with letter grading, which is uncommon enough to work across all media, though is a bit of a challenge to decipher. Ultimately, I decided to stick with the system I know best and which seemed to me the clearest: the standard ten-point scale. This comes with the caveat that I won't be scoring individual television episodes - though perhaps will do full season reviews - because there are so many that I'd need to use a far more intricate system to reflect the differences between each, where I'd rather keep it simple.

So without futher ado, follow the jump to meet the scores you can expect to see at the end of each film or game review posted on this blog, and what each number means...