Fall weather has arrived, which dictates that I should wear jeans. I’ll do it, but I don’t have to like it. Anyone have suggestions for alternatives to the restrictive bastard that is premium denim?

News Blips:

Reaction to Nintendo’s 3DS circle-pad cradle is less than warm. Last night, Famitsu revealed that a new Monster Hunter game is on the way for the 3DS. In order to play it, however, a thumb-pad cradle dubbed the “Expansion Slide Pad” will be required. Gamers -- as they’re wont to do -- didn’t latch onto the good news regarding a new game announcement. Instead, they noticed a few of the glaring flaws in the new peripheral’s design -- namely, that the already large handheld will now have an even more difficult time fitting into pants pockets. Message boards were flooded with scathing photoshops and funny animated gifs. To be fair to Nintendo, no one’s had their hands on this new device. Maybe it works great, but it does seem like a rather shoddy solution to a problem that should've been considered in the early stages of the original design. [GamePro]

Bethesda assumes everyone has at least a two-bedroom apartment to house its Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Collector’s Edition box. This thing is huge. Not 3DS second-circle-pad huge, but pretty big nonetheless. How big? Let’s see...next to the packaging, we can see a standard greeting card, which typically measures five inches by seven inches. Based on the principals of trigonometry and/or copying and pasting that greeting card on top of the box several times, I’ve comes to the conclusion that this limited version of Skyrim will be about 17.5 by 17.5 by 15 inches. Or maybe not. All I know is that it’s mammoth and that math is hard. Bethesda did say that this edition will be extremely limited, so a pre-order is the only way to ensure that moving the baby into your bedroom to make space for this thing will really be necessary.

EA has sold 1.4 million copies of Madden NFL 12 in its first week. Screw this Bitmob thing! All the money is in professional football games. I’m gonna go make my own right now....

Much later.

Wow, those EA lawyers are good. I just finished programming line 15 of my NFL game -- where all the players are Barry Sanders -- when I heard my door come crashing down and the pounding footsteps of the publisher’s legal team storming my flat. Who knew that the exclusivity license granted EA Sports the right to stun gun anyone who begins work on an NFL game? That sort of agreement is probably expensive, but -- with a guaranteed million-seller like Madden -- it’s probably worth the cost.

Dead Island’s console patch is still in approval limbo -- it will go live as soon as it’s given the thumbs up. Many gamers have described the island-resort zombie game as broken but enjoyable. Well, developer Deep Silver announced that a day-one patch would be dispatched to address many of the issues people have had, which should transform their busted-but-fun survival-horror title into one that is simply fun. Unfortunately, that fix is still hung up in the bureaucratic bowels of console manufactures Microsoft and Sony. I’ll get Jamie Lee Curtis on the phone to apply some Activia to this situation immediately -- y’know, to loosen things up a bit. [G4TV]

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