Quake Champions and Paladins - Shooting Like it's 1999

It's official. I'm hooked. After a bit of a shaky start I'm finally getting the hang of Quake Champions and my scores are starting to get a little more decent. I don't think I'll ever bother with any ranked 1vs1 and 2vs2 stuff, because I find (T)DMs so much less stressful. When you look me up on the stat tracker (please don't), you can see I've been steadily and consistently getting better. I can't remember the last time I've had so much fun with an arena shooter. Or any FPS game, for that matter.

The guy kept insisting I wasn't a real kitten for the entire duration of the match.

There's just something immensely satisfying about watching Doomguy and Quake guy and a bunch of other weirdos running all over the place, blowing each other into meaty chunks with rocket launchers. I sincerely hope the game is gonna maintain some of its momentum and won't immediately disappear into oblivion, like certain other shooters, which aren't Overwatch, Fortnite or CoD. It's been far too long since I've played a decent arena shooter! Back in my teens, we'd talk about nothing but Quake and Unreal (Tournament) in school, we'd all meet online after class, shoot each other to pieces, then talk about it back in school the day after. Life was good. And then came Counter-Strike.

The gaming industry is terribly boring and unoriginal. We were all instantly hooked on CS, there was absolutely nothing like it, and CSGO is still one of the biggest, most important shooters out there today. And suddenly every shooter had swat teams and terrorists and realistic weapons and objectives and one life per round and all that over the top silliness with rocket launchers and miniguns wasn't cool anymore. I'm exaggerating a bit here, but arena shooters haven't exactly been relevant since the early 2000s. It was all terrorists or nazis, then zombies or nazi zombies. Just like everything is battle royale today, everything had to be a MOBA at some point and everyone made an MMO, which set out to be the next WoW-killer. Because why innovate, when you can just take something popular and fucking copy it? Which can absolutely work if you add your own ideas and improvements, like Fortnite did over PUBG, but can also hilariously backfire twice if you're Cliff Bleszinsky.

I gitted gud.

In other news, fucking Paladins. Never played it, never looked at it. Same for Overwatch. To me, these games are like MMO-style battlegrounds with guns. You're a tank, healer or damage dealer, people in chat will yell random abuse at you if they disagree with your choice of character or the way you play, everyone is an asshole and you always end a session feeling just a little bit miserable. There are plenty of videos all over YouTube, where people lose every last ounce of their shit in ranked mode voice chat, even (and particularly) when they're all the way at the bottom of the scoreboard, contributing absolutely fucking nothing. Not how I want to spend my precious spare time. And then Nintendo came along and added the magic words, which make EVERY GAME EVER attractive to me. "But you can play it on the go." Not Overwatch, but the next best thing - Paladins.

My damage is best damage.

When I first heard about Paladins' impending Switch release, I just shrugged at it. So what? Fortnite is on Switch now, runs at 30 FPS, looks about as crappy as the Android version. Doom, whilst super fun on the Switch, struggles a bit performance-wise and, no matter how much I genuinely love it, is a blurry, pixellated mess. The fun gameplay, motion controls and the fact IT'S FUCKING DOOM 2016 IN MY POCKET totally make up for all that, but fuck Paladins with a rake!

Yeah well. Paladins runs at 60 FPS on the Switch. And in docked mode it looks more or less like the Xbox One X version, except at a lower resolution. Seriously, check out the comparison tool over on Eurogamer. Yes, the Switch footage is a little less clear and crisp and a bit fuzzy around the edges, but for a portable hybrid console, this is ridiculously impressive. So I went and downloaded a game for my Switch, which I had absolutely zero interest in five minutes earlier.

And did I mention my horse is amazing?

I've been playing the shit out of this game non-stop ever since. I woke up this morning, stayed in bed, fired up the Switch and played a fast-paced 5on5 multiplayer FPS over the internet IN BED! I play a huge-ass dragon with a rocket launcher, I shoot people in the face, push carts full of explosives into enemy base camps, gain levels, unlock cosmetics and I'm having way too much fun with a game I completely suck at. I can't aim for shit with a controller, I'm still waiting for them to finally implement motion/gyro aiming, but for some reason I just can't stop playing this game all day long. It helps that there's cross-platform play with Xbox users, so there's a large pool of players around no matter what time of day I try to get into a match.

Even my MVP footage is garbage, but I'm having too much fun for it to really bother me.

I won't lie. One reason why I'm enjoying the Switch version so much is the complete lack of text and voice chat, apart from a few canned phrases. The moment they add voice support will probably be the day I remove this game and never look back. But right now it's just good fun and the worst thing that ever happens is when somebody on your team gets salty and decides to go AFK for the duration of a match. It doesn't happen a whole lot, but it happens. Again, just like battlegrounds in an MMO.

The only real downside to Paladins on the Switch is how right now the game is in 'Early Access' and you can only play if you shell out $25 on a founder's pack. Sure, you unlock every current and future champion for life when you buy this thing, but it's a steep asking price for a game that's free2play on every other platform out there. On the plus side, it's also going to go F2P on the Switch this summer if you don't feel like ponying up for a founder's pack. And they might even have gyro aiming by then!