The holiday season is nearly upon us, and that means it's time to start grabbing gifts for family members and friends. If you've got a Nintendo fan on your list this year, you'll want to check this out. We've rounded up a number of great gifts that are perfect for Nintendo fans of all ages. From popular Switch games and accessories to LEGO Super Mario-themed sets, we'll make shopping for the perfect gift this year a breeze.

The Top 3 Must-Have Nintendo Gifts

If there's one thing many Nintendo fans will be looking for this year, it's the brand new Nintendo Switch OLED. With its larger, more vibrant display, it's sure to please anyone who can get their hands on one as they are highly sought-after. Aside from that, Nintendo Switch Lite is a great portable option, and you can't go wrong with Metroid Dread – Samus' first proper 2D adventure in nearly 20 years.

Best Nintendo Switch Game Gifts

The Nintendo Switch isn't much without its great collection of games. This year, treat your friends and family to some of 2021's biggest hits including The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD and WarioWare: Get It Together!, or spring for some all-around family fun with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Best Nintendo Switch Carrying Case Gifts

Every Nintendo Switch owner needs a great carrying case to keep everything protected while on the go. We've gathered up some great options from large hardshell cases to small, zippered pouches to satisfy every gamer.

Best LEGO Super Mario Gifts

Experience the Mushroom Kingdom in a while new way with the interactive LEGO Super Mario sets. Featuring iconic characters and locations from across the Mario series, these are sure to be a hit with any Nintendo fan on your shopping list this year.

Best Nintendo Collectible Gifts and More

If you're not sure what to get the Nintendo fan in your life, consider getting them a collectible item they can proudly show off, or themed tabletop games featuring characters from across their favorite franchises.

Best Nintendo Switch Controllers and Accessories Gifts

Make sure the Nintendo Switch owners on your shopping list are ready to game with shiny new controllers or storage solutions to ensure they can take all their favorite games with them.

Matthew Adler is a Commerce, Features, Guides, News, Previews, and Reviews writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @MatthewAdler and watch him stream on Twitch.

Hip-hop supergroup Czarface has always drawn heavy inspiration from superhero comics, so it's only fitting that their music becomes the inspiration for an original graphic novel dubbed Czarface: A Czar Is Born.

With the graphic novel hitting stores on November 2, IGN can exclusively debut a new preview of the comic. Check it out in the slideshow gallery below:

Czarface: A Czar Is Born is published by Z2 Comics, co-written by band member Seamus "Esoteric" Ryan and Chris Robinson (Limbo Beach) and drawn by Ariel Olivetti (Punisher: War Journal). The book aims to provide an origin story for the Czarface character. Here's the official description:

Hero to some, villain to others, Czarface's true origins have remained a mystery…UNTIL NOW! Who are the Zarta Ku? And why has their desperate mission brought them to Planet Earth? Meanwhile, Zach and his dog were just a washed up wrestling tag team making ends meet on the comicon circuit when they crossed paths with a woman who will change both their lives forever. Written by Czarface's own Esoteric (Merry X-Men Holiday Special) with art by veteran illustrator Ariel Olivetti (Cable; Punisher War Journal), this landmark original graphic novel is a must-have for Wednesday warriors, wrestling marks, and hip-hop heads–or fans of all three combined!

"We started to build a discography around raw hip-hop, influenced by Silver Age era comics and all things pop culture, and created the character Czarface as a visual representation to symbolize it," Ryan tells IGN. "So many people responded positively to the character, and the somewhat extracurricular parts, such as the collectible Czarface action figures, that I wanted to give this version of him the origin story he deserves in an OGN!"

Czarface: A Czar Is Born will be released on Tuesday, November 2. You can preorder the book through Amazon and various other retailers.

In other comic book news, Image Comics workers have just formed a union, and Telltale's Clementine is about to star in her own Walking Dead graphic novel.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

Uncharted 3's most memorable sequence is undoubtedly Nathan Drake's running battle through a cargo plane in midflight. It's peak Naughty Dog action design, steadily escalating until Drake finds himself hanging desperately from a cargo net over the desert.

Hard as it is to believe, Uncharted 3 is now 10 years old, having first released on PS3 on November 1, 2011. To mark the occasion, several of its original developers came together to share their memories of Uncharted 3's development. They include building the cargo plane sequence, which director Kurt Margenau says was the first time in his career he had a chance to build such a setpiece.

"It was truly a collaborative effort with animators, programmers, sound designers, and anyone else who cared to contribute. It started with an off-the-cuff idea of, 'What if you could chase down a plane on the tarmac and board it,' which turned into, 'Ok, what if the plane crashed while you were in it?' and then figuring out how that could even work and be playable," Margenau remembers.

The scene was born of Naughty Dog's desire to keep escalating after Uncharted 2, which left the studio confident that it could "achieve whatever wild-ass blockbuster ideas we could think up to one-up ourselves."

"I was making little models of trucks on my desk to figure out how the player could climb on these things as they're hanging out of the back of the plane. Jeremy [Yates] was doing wire-work on the mocap stage to capture climbing on a cargo net blowing in the wind. We had to implement some old-school perfectly seamed-up infinitely scrolling backgrounds to make the desert able to move infinitely below the plane (while the plane actually stood still. shhh). We even had a fully playable zero-g sequence inside the plane that we cut at the last second!" Margenau says.

The sequence wound up being one of the best moments in Uncharted 3, and one of the best in the series overall. It wound up inspiring a similar sequence in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, and a live-action version will be showcased in the upcoming Uncharted movie. Margenau called seeing the scene in the recent trailer "surreal" and expressed excitement at seeing the final version.

In the meantime, the Uncharted series remains largely dormant, as former director Amy Hennig has long since departed and Naughty Dog has moved on to other projects. However, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection is currently under development for PS5, with a release date set for 2022.

Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN

Returnal's recent 2.0 update finally gave players a method to suspend their game, turn off their PS5, and return to the suspend point to continue their run. The catch? That suspend point erases when you return, meaning you can still absolutely bungle a run in the next area and have to run through the lengthy, punishing roguelike world all over again. Now players have discovered an exploit that turns that suspend point into a full-blown save point can be reloaded again and again like the save scumming monsters we are.

As described by Inverse writer Joseph Yaden (and reported by Kotaku), the exploit requires you to suspend your save in-game, upload your save to PlayStation's cloud servers, and then when you die, download the save from the cloud. This will allow you to return to your suspend point as many times as you want as long as it's in the cloud, since it can't be erased.

A tedious chore? Sure, but not nearly as tedious as restarting a run in Returnal. One of the most common complaints leveled against Returnal was that its roguelike runs were so long that they could easily last over an hour or more. This made it even more difficult for players who had a limited amount of time to commit or had a distraction take their focus away. The only solution at the time was leaving your game running and putting your PS5 in standby mode, the lower-power state that lets you quickly pick up a game from where you left off.

It's worth noting that Returnal's suspend system won't let you save during boss battles, cinematics, first-person sequences, or "intense combat scenarios," so keep that in mind when planning your next run.

Hopefully this will let players get more snapshots from the other alien biomes, since the 2.0 update also added a photo mode to Returnal.

Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/scum for IGN. He says "hi, fellow Joseph" on Twitter.

Call of Duty: Vanguard's PC specs have officially been revealed, giving players an idea of just how beefy their rig will need to be to venture into its alternate vision of WWII. Pre-loading time has also been announced, which will help you play as soon as the game releases on November 5.

The big takeaways are that you can still miraculously get away with a CPU as low as an Intel Core i3-4340 or AMD FX-6300. If you want WWII to look its finest in 4K, however, you'll need a much more recent Intel Core i9-9900K/AMD Ryzen 9 3900X.

As previously reported, Vanguard will take up considerably less storage space than earlier Call of Duty games. You'll need a minimum of 36GB if you just want to play multiplayer and zombies mode, but getting 4K assets will cost you "up to 64 GB" or up to 32 GB with Vanguard's Hi-Rez Assets Cache feature, which streams high-resolution assets.

Read below for the full list of PC spec requirements for Call of Duty: Vanguard.

Call of Duty: Vanguard PC Spec Requirements

Operating System

Minimum: Windows 10 64-bit (latest update)

Recommended/Competitive/Ultra 4K: Windows 10 64-bit (latest update) or Windows 11 64-bit (latest update)

CPU

Minimum: Intel Core i3-4340 or AMD FX-6300

Recommended: Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X

Competitive: Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 7 1800X

Ultra 4K: Intel Core i9-9900K or AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

RAM

Minimum: 8 GB

Recommended: 12 GB

Competitive/Ultra 4K: 16 GB

Storage Space**

Minimum: 36 GB at launch (Multiplayer and Zombies only)

Recommended/Competitive/Ultra 4K: 61 GB at launch

Hi-Rez Assets Cache

Minimum/Recommended/Competitive: Up to 32 GB

Ultra 4K: Up to 64 GB

Hi-Rez Assets Cache is optional disk space that can be used to stream high-resolution assets. That option can be turned off in the game's settings.

Video Card

Minimum: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon RX 470

Recommended: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580

Competitive: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070/RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 5700XT

Ultra 4K: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

Video Memory

Minimum: 2 GB

Recommended: 4 GB

Competitive: 8 GB

Ultra 4K: 10 GB

Recommended Drivers of NVIDIA/AMD

NVIDIA: 472.12

AMD: 21.9.1

Call of Duty: Vanguard Pre-Loading Time

If you've pre-ordered Call of Duty: Vanguard on Battle.net, you can pre-load it before its November 5 release date.

Pre-loading starts on November 2 at 10 AM PT. Activision notes in its blog post that some players might find that their digital copy doesn't automatically pre-load, so you'll need to find Call of Duty: Vanguard under the Battle.net Launcher "partner games" section and follow the prompts to get your download started.

Don't forget to check out IGN's preview coverage of Call of Duty: Vanguard and Call of Duty: Warzone's new Pacific map. You can also check out our multiplayer beta impressions.