Archive for June 2007

Henry goes to Barcelona

June 23rd, 2007

Thierry Henry has confirmed that subject to passing a medical on Monday he will sign a four year deal with Barcelona, reportedly worth £16 million.

While this is not entirely unexpected news, it is still sad to see him go. I had thought I’d be less affected by this, but when I heard the news on the radio this morning confirming his move, I suppose it really hit me what it meant. I think it’s not overstating things to say that this is the end of an era at Arsenal. It’s more than just the fact that he has been an outstanding player for Arsenal, the clubs leading scorer. It’s about the way Wenger has shaped his team and tactics around Henry and his pace. Wenger will now be forced to change this.

There have already been signs last season of this shift when Henry wasn’t fit, and Wenger has tried out different combinations. Adebayor, Baptista, Aliadiere, and van Persie have all stepped in, and the team have had to adjust. However, Baptista did not get a contract and has returned to Spain, while Aliadiere has moved to Middlesborough in his quest for regular first team football. This leaves things very thin up front, though Bendtner will be back from Birmingham, and he looks to be a good prospect.

But there’s the problem – there’s too many good prospects and not enough proven world-class players. With the sale of Henry, and hopefully a good deal for Reyes, Wenger should have enough cash to get hold of some “super, super” players. The team needs them. The fans need them. Another mediocre “transition” season will not be good enough, and could see the departure of Wenger at the end of it to top it all.

So, right now, things are not looking too bright. The only silver lining is that Wenger will now have more funds to chase the top-class players such as Torres and Tevez that the team needs.

Halo 3 ARG – Iris

June 21st, 2007

There’s lots of stuff I’ve been meaning to post recently, including my final impressions of the Halo 3 Beta, but they’ll have to wait. The “Halo Nation” is abuzz over Iris – the Halo 3 ARG. So far there haven’t been many puzzles to solve, but rather we’ve been led from place to place. There’s lots of coverage at Hushed Casket, but I’m following things over at the newly created forums at args.bungie.org.

I’m not going to go into the progress so far in detail here, but it started with the appearance of AdjutantReflex on the Bungie.net Halo 3 forum, and links to www.halo3.com/comic, which in turn led to http://www.societyoftheancients.com and a countdown site at 206.16.223.65. The countdown finished abruptly as AdjutantReflex was destroyed/asimilated by something older, more powerful, and now you are redirected to 206.16.223.61 where there’s one of the “servers” that are referred to on the www.halo3.com site.

Clicking on certain glyphs on the rotating machine provides several files to download, and also plays a movie. I’ve managed to re-encode the movie as a Quicktime Movie. You can download it by right-clicking here and chosing Save Target As… or whatever is equivalent in your browser. It looks like this ARG will give us more info on the Forerunner and the background to why they did what they did 100,000 years ago. I’m eager to find out more, but hopefully it will involve more puzzles and less just waiting around for the next thing to be revealed 🙂