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Another high-profile Nintendo Switch release has been leaked onto the internet nearly a week out from its launch.

This time around it’s Mario Party Superstars, which officially arrives on the Switch on 29th October. It follows on from the leak of Metroid Dread earlier this month.

If you are trying to avoid any spoilers, you might want to refrain from searching this game on social media – as images, video footage, the game’s soundtrack, and even the game itself appear to have been uploaded. Some are already supposedly playing the title on Switch and via emulation.

Our Mario Party Superstars review goes live next week. If we hear any developments about this latest Switch leak, we’ll be sure to let you know.

Fortnite Resident Evil skins have arrived in the Item Shop today, bringing yet another collaboration to the battle royale and metaverse candidate. Two characters from Capcom’s beloved series, Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield can be found in the Item Shop and purchased separately or together. Here’s everything you need to know about the Fortnite Resident Evil skins.

Fortnite And Resident Evil Collaboration

Chris and Jill come to the Item Shop with a full suite of cosmetic accessories that any fan of Resident Evil will find immediately familiar. As part of the new S.T.A.R.S. Team set, each character skin includes two total styles inspired by different moments in their respective histories.

To complete the look, you can also pick up back bling inspired by Resident Evil’s safe rooms and healing items, and find a few new pickaxes based on melee weapons from the seminal survival-horror series. Here’s everything on offer in the complete Fortnite Resident Evil cosmetic set:

• Chris Redfield skin with Hound Wolf Squad alternate style
• Jill Valentine skin with Raccoon City alternate style
• Green Herb back bling with Red Herb and Blue Herb alternate styles
• Saving Keystrokes back bling
• Hotdogger pickaxe
• Stun Rod pickaxe

If you’re a Resident Evil devotee, you can pick up all of these cosmetics in a bundle for a reduced price that also includes the exclusive Survival loading screen and an exclusive emote, the Brolly Stroll inspired by the overarching villain of the series, the Umbrella Corporation.

Jill and Chris join the Gaming Legends Series in Fortnite which also includes heroes from games like Halo, Tomb Raider, Horizon, and God of War–it even includes Rocket League in the form of Battle-Car back bling. Which gaming legend do you want to see in Fortnite next?

The Nintendo Switch OLED has been out for a handful of weeks now, and if you haven’t already applied a screen protector – you really should.

While Nintendo claims the screen is made out of glass, YouTube channel JerryRigEverything has now put the new screen to the test and it’s only got 2/10 screen protection – which makes it as vulnerable as plastic.

“Unfortunately, what we’re seeing here are scratches at level three with deeper grooves at level four, which means this new OLED screen has a surface layer of plastic.”

Although the Switch includes its own layer of protection in the form of an “anti-scattering adhesive film”, this won’t do much at all when it comes to regular everyday use – so it’s advisable to purchase a proper screen protector to minimise scatch damage.

“It’s good to know that the OLED screen is soft so that we can avoid putting it in situations where it can be damaged by coins, keys or other metal objects.

“Nintendo has said that the screen itself is made from glass and that this plastic film which feels very permanent is an anti-scattering adhesive layer, which is there to help keep the glass shards from scattering if the display ever does shatter…and it is probably a good thing to have.”

Nintendo also advises users not to remove this special layer of protection. So again – get a screen protector if you haven’t already to avoid putting this new system in situations where it can potentially be scratched by sharp objects.

How is your Switch OLED screen going? Have you put a screen protector on it yet? Leave a comment down below.

Fortnite‘s spooky month of crossovers continues with a new collaboration with Capcom and Resident Evil. Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine are the latest horror icons to drop on the Island and face The Sidways’ Cube Monsters.

The S.T.A.R.S. Team Set includes Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine with their S.T.A.R.S. uniform. Chris also comes with his Hound Wolf Squad outfit from Resident Evil Village as an alt, and Jill will be able to don her look from Resident Evil 3 Remake.

Credit: Epic Games

In addition to the character skins, the set includes the Green Herb Back Bling (with Red Herb and Blue Herb alt styles), a typewriter Saving Keystrokes Back Bling, the Hod Dogger Pickaxe, and Stun Rod Pickaxe. There is also the Brolly Stroll Emote complete with an umbrella.

The Chris, Jill, Herb Back Bling, and Typewriter Back Bling will be available in a bundle with the option to purchase the two Pickaxes and emote in the S.T.A.R.S. Team Gear Bundle.

As October continues, Epic Games has been adding horror-themed collaborations to Fortnite. The month kicked off with a collaboration featuring classic monsters from Universal Pictures’ horror library. Fortnite also added Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

So we have something very interesting for our readers today. We were able to exclusively get our hands on the first-ever benchmarks for Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake mobility processors – which are going to go head to head against the Apple M1 Max processors clawing away market share as well as AMD’s upcoming mobility chips. While we do not have the scores for AMD’s next-generation mobility chips, we do have the scores for the current generation x86 chips as well as the validated score for Apple’s M1 Max.

Intel Core i9 12900HK mobility CPU benchmarked: faster than the Apple M1 Max, 11980HK and AMD 5980HX

The Apple M1 Max is a fantastic chip and is going to push both AMD and Intel to perform at their very best. And while I doubt x86 architecture will ever beat ARM on power efficiency, absolute power (within roughly comparable battery life) is another matter altogether. Geekbench has historically been a benchmark where Apple has reigned supreme (because it relies heavily on algorithmic optimizations) but it was still pretty awe-inspiring to see the Apple M1 Max score absolutely decimating everything x86 in-sight. It even managed to beat Intel’s flagship desktop chip: the Intel Core i9 11900K.

Intel’s upcoming Core i9 12900HK based on Intel 7 features an 8 + 6 Alder Lake architecture.

As tech enthusiasts would know, Intel stumbled quite a bit on the 14nm process and has only recently recovered from this misadventure – meaning Apple chips for the past few years (and even AMD ones) have had a distinct node advantage. Beginning with Alder Lake, however (which is built on Intel 7), this advantage is going to seriously diminish as Intel finally moves on to a sub 14nm node on its desktop side. The introduction of extremely power-efficient “e-cores” will further improve performance on the mobility side, considering Alder Lake’s big.SMALL design was purpose-built for mobility. Without any further ado, here is the score of Intel’s 12900HK Alder Lake Mobility flagship in Geekbench.

The Alder Lake’s powerful p-cores effortlessly take the performance crown in the single-threaded benchmark with a score of 1851. To put this into perspective, Apple’s 5 nm-based M1 Max chip scores 1785 in single-threaded performance. The Core i9 11980HK (note: we found several overclocked and stock benchmarks for this processor on Geekbench but will be using ‘stock’ configurations considering our ADL score is also stock and makes for a like-for-like comparison) follows behind with a score of 1616 and AMD’s best mobility chip clocks in at 1506. This means Intel has improved the single-threaded performance by 14.5% generation over generation.

Almost all of us expected Intel to win on the single-threaded front because of high clock rates and some serious architectural improvements but what is surprising is that they even beat the Apple M1 Max on the multi-threaded front. The Alder Lake Core i9 12900HK mobility processor gets an astounding 13256 score which is followed by Apple at 12753 points. The Intel 11980HK (stock) is further into the horizon at 9149 points and AMD clocks in at 8217 points. This is a generation over generation increase of almost 45% in roughly the same TDP – although not surprising because even though the ADL-H CPU only has 8 “big cores” the small cores have proven to be quite powerful as well.

Now keep in mind, I have no qualms that Apple is still going to win on a power efficiency metric – they always have since the A11 – but Apple’s reign as the fastest mobility chip “period” seems like it is going to be short-lived (we expect ADL-H to land in early 2022). Another important point to note here is that this benchmark was done using Windows 11, which allows Intel’s brand new Thread Director technology to run – so some of these gains could be the result of better hardware scheduling as well.

Geekbench 5.4.1 source links: Apple M1 Max, Intel 11980HK, AMD R9 5980HX

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate might be the greatest crossover video game of all time, but it’s been far from easy for the game’s director Masahiro Sakurai over the years.

Apart from health issues and struggles when adding certain fighters – whenever he appeared on a show, did an interview, or posted something on social media, he had to be extremely careful as some fans would speculate about anything he said and link it back to the next fighter or collab coming to Nintendo’s all-star brawler on the Switch. Obviously, as of this week, it’s the end of an era – with the final DLC fighter, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, now available.

In other words, it means Sakurai can now share a bit more about his personal life and love of video games, without fans thinking everything he posts on Twitter is a hint. Of course, we’re sure that won’t stop some, but if you have been keeping tabs on the development cycle, it’s pretty clear at this point that Smash is done – at least for now.

So, what’s his first game-related photo post-Smash Ultimate development? It’s a photo of an Among Us toy alongside his cat. Now, just keep in mind, if he had posted this sort of photo earlier this month, the entire Smash fandom would have potentially gone into a complete meltdown. Heck, it’s admittedly still pretty neat how he’s acknowledging one of the most popular multiplayer releases in recent years.

So, there you have it – Sakurai now feels free to post what he likes (in relation to games), without having to worry about fans thinking it’s a hint. Well – again, we’re sure it won’t stop some people from speculating, but if Sakurai’s happy to post this sort of stuff now on his Twitter page, then good for him!

In addition to Smash Bros., Sakurai will also soon be ending his Famitsu columns, which he’s been writing since 2003. It truly is the end of the era. Fortunately, he won’t be stepping away from the video game industry (at least completely) – reiterating earlier this year how he wouldn’t be retiring after Ultimate. What would you like to see next from Sakurai, apart from a well-deserved rest? Leave a comment down below.

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