Over the two decades I’ve spent gaming, there are a few legendary titles which have taken me on an emotional roller coaster and engraved themselves within my memory. However, I can only give one a 10-plus out of 10: osu!
What is it?
osu!, yes, lowercase, is a free-to-play rhythm game like none I’ve ever seen.
First, it’s on PC, which is fairly unusual. Click the pink circle icon and you’re transported into a different world. After a few seconds of loading, the game hits you with a song telling you to click the circles. A few seconds later, the drums kick in and you’re pumped!
You open up the tutorial which calmly explains the objective of the game. Circles appear on your screen, and unlike most other rhythm games, the notes don’t come to you, you have to mouse over them and hit the “z” or “x” keys before they disappear.
After a calm tutorial with the narrator complimenting you along the way, you load into your first map. If you’re anything like me, you’ll do decently, but then repeat it a few times until getting a perfect score.
After gaining some confidence, your curiosity will get the best of you, and you’ll click the three-star section. Oh no no no.
You’ll fail within the first ten seconds of the song. You may be tempted to try again and manage to hit one or two more circles.
Eventually, the thought of this game not being made for mere mortals may cross your mind.
However, you persist for a few days and finally pass your first three-star map. You may experience loud noises coming from your mouth and your hands may unexplainably start flailing after this accomplishment.
Congratulations; you are now playing osu!
Constantly Evolving
After spending an unconscionable amount of time on one task, you’ll start looking for other songs. You’ll notice there’s no more than 30 songs and get a bit confused. The game is free; you can’t expect too much.
But then, you get the idea to Google if it’s possible to download more songs.
The floodgates are about to open.
What makes osu! an amazing game is despite having a small development team, despite being over 12 years old, it still manages to continually improve by adding new levels, called beatmaps, every day.
How does the company do this? They don’t. They created the tools and then released them to the public.
Everyone has the ability to create beatmaps from scratch using any song they like. You can play maps from pretty much any genre, contemporary or old school, EDM, rock, rap, pop, classical, and a lot, I mean a lot, of anime theme songs. What’s a rhythm game without weebs after all?
There’s a lot of weeb, I mean TV size, beatmaps.
Giving the community a map builder isn’t anything new. However, what happens after a map’s release is brilliant.
Uploading a beatmap is similar to a post on a forum. Everyone can see it, search for it, and it’ll have more visibility the more people download, play and like it.
However, unlike any other game I’ve heard of, you can gain global ranking based on community-created maps.
Competitive Spirit
No, I didn’t say you can get a high score on a specific map and compare it to other people’s scores on that same level. You get a weighted score based on the difficulty of the map that contributes to your overall rank as a player.
Let me explain.
The game automatically assigns maps a difficulty rating based on factors like how spaced out the notes are, how fast they disappear and how long the song is. If a song gets popular enough, it can become a ranked map.
Through a combination of voting, automated systems and developer input, player-created maps can become ranked and will start awarding points.
Every player is globally ranked against others through points called performance points, also called pp… yeah…
So, after a map is submitted, gets popular and becomes ranked, points are awarded based on how difficult it is.
This system encourages continual improvement by awarding more points based on difficulty, and pushes players to create new styles of maps through small developer meddling like featuring maps and hosting contests.
Also, only the top 100 hardest maps a player has completed count toward their rank. This prevents degenerates like myself from grinding easy maps.
Pushing Boundaries
With this system that took longer to explain than I thought, I’m constantly amazed at what humanity is capable of.
Three years ago, I realized I could never be a mechanical god as I saw Cookiezi, also known as Shige or now chocomint, do something inhuman. I saw him full-combo a song called FREEDOM DiVE. Not sure why it’s capitalized like that, but ok.
Cookiezi’s highest rated play features insane streams and triples. Please enjoy the piano.
Firstly, he has a mod on the song which makes the notes disappear before you’re supposed to click on them. This obviously makes the timing harder.
The song starts normally, with something even I’d be able to do, then introduces a stream, a series of notes where players usually alternate tapping by using their index and middle finger. I’ve been explained this to be similar to how drummers either drum with one stick or both. As I have no musical talent or understanding, I’m just going to take their word for it.
We then start getting into a few more streams, which I can’t do by the way, some triple notes, basically a stream, but only three notes. We continue on with the impressive gameplay for a few more seconds, then we see the best humanity has to offer.
The song hits Cookiezi with a 30-note stream, and he’s still at 100 percent accuracy. He follows the notes perfectly with his stylus, a peripheral some players choose over using a mouse. He keeps getting assaulted with stream after stream, triples and streams, but he keeps it up, only dropping to 99.8 percent accuracy.
After over a minute, there’s a slight pause and he’s at 99.88 percent accuracy, not missing a note, and only slightly mistiming a few. Then, the piano starts taking over.
osu! is singularly responsible for my appreciation of the piano.
The refrain hits and Cookiezi is still going strong. Then another pause happens. The moment of ascension is about to occur.
Now, the piano takes over. The streams get even crazier. The first time seeing this made me speechless. But pretty much every time I watch the video, I have the same reaction: smiling and extending my arms as far as they’ll go, like a conductor calling for a crescendo… I think?
Streams I can’t comprehend, gameplay that looks impossible is occurring right before my eyes. Hearing the distorted clacking sound effects pierce the heavens is awe inspiring. It never fails to get me emotional. Seeing how far humanity has pushed reaction and competition is incredible.
I’m still speechless as his cursor follows every note perfectly. It’s flowing through the map seemingly effortlessly.
After almost 40 seconds of constant streaming, he pauses and messages a friend. Now comes the “easy” part.
After about another minute, he full-combos the song. The people watching online are mystified, I was mystified the first time I watched the video, I still am. That was one of the most impressive things in gaming I’d ever seen.
That video was posted three years ago and the play was worth 894 pp. This was the highest score achieved at the time.
It was an amazing accomplishment and Cookiezi was considered the best player then. He’s still considered one of the best, but now four of the five highest ranked players have scores of over 1,000, with the top player called WhiteCat completing a 1,138 pp play.
WhiteCat has to be a robot, right?
To say I have no idea what’s going on is an understatement. To me, the play looks only possible through using a computer program. The practice and memorization, and of course talent, required is unfathomable to me.
osu! pushes the limits of what was previously thought possible, and I love it. Maps people thought were unbeatable are now the standard. It’s evolving at a faster pace than most other games. That, coupled with the simplicity of the game, meaning there’s little to mess up, is the reason I give it a 10-plus out of ten.
I hope other games follow in its steps by making simple games and giving control over to the community. The content millions of players can make for free dwarfs what a small indie company™ can do with millions of dollars. And what says gaming industry more than exploiting free labor?
Oh, also osu! is technically pronounced “ōs,” like ‘oh’ with an ‘s,’but just pronounce the ‘u.’ No one cares.
