Go play the game: Osu!

Ravidge

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May 14, 2008
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Play Osu! It's a neat game. Watch me write a essay about a game that has no story and very simple gameplay.
250px-Osuungimped.png


What is Osu?
If you're the kind of person who just wants a video instead of a bunch of words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EufUR6Hz2yo That's the game.
It's more or less a PC port of the nintendo DS games "osu tatakae ouendan" also known as "Elite Beat Agents". The gameplay concept are the same in Osu! except there's a lot less stories being told in the background.

If you've never heard of any of the nintendo DS games, then the simplest way to put it is:
It's a rhythm game where you point your cursor at objects on the screen and then click on them along with the beat.

It's very competitive and the ranking system is accurate enough to value real skill over just 'play time'. You have no team mates to blame, it's all you, and you're terrible at osu, just like everyone else. You can't win in this game, just suck slightly less compared to all the rest. That's the goal.
But those times when you get a sick full combo, it's a good feeling.

You're free to use any input device you want that can move the cursor and any button to click the objects. The most common setup by far is mouse+keyboard.
drawingtablet+keyboard is widely seen as the "best". But playing with mouse-only is also very possible (not many people do it, it's hard), touchscreen is also a thing but even more rare, and not great.

It takes 5 seconds to start, and then 5 more seconds to be inside playing a map. It's incredibly easy to just start up between things. Whenever you have some downtime, just play. Just make a shortcut somewhere visible and click it whenever you feel bored.

Get the game
http://osu.ppy.sh/p/download It's free.

Get Maps
This is the hardest part. And I really wish the devs made some improvements here, but for now... it's pretty tedious and difficult to find what you want to/can play.

The main page for downloading beatmaps http://osu.ppy.sh/p/beatmaplist click the images to hear a preview.
If you're totally allergic to japanese music and don't even want to see it http://osu.ppy.sh/p/beatmaplist?m=0&r=0&g=0&la=5 for instrumental only.

Install .osz beatmap files by using Windows "Open with..." Osu!.exe and the maps auto installs. You can also just drag the file into to osu! window to install the map. (This works for .osk files as well, .osk is for skins).

But it's more efficient to get the packs http://osu.ppy.sh/p/packlist start downloading the most recent packs, avoid the oldest. But since you're downloading a pack you're gonna get a lot of songs you don't want. Deal with it. Just install them all and then delete them in client if you dislike them (right click them in song selection and choose delete).

Best way to get decent maps: play multiplayer, and Sharing among friends.

Getting beatmaps you enjoy is the hardest thing and it does take some time to find em.
[Good music] [Well mapped] [At your difficulty level]
Pick two. That's basically how it goes when hunting for maps.

Here's one I like: Feint - Time Bomb it has 4 difficulties, so it's a good starting point I guess.


I want to know more about Osu (non gameplay stuff)
Osu is made by a Australian dude who calls himself "Peppy", he lives in Japan and works on the game full time as I understand it. The game has been around since 2007 and has been growing ever since. At daily peak hours it has about 12,000 users online at once (if it was on Steam it would be hovering around #15 for daily peak user stats).

A large chunk of users are from east Asia, probably close to half the total users are from Japan+Korea+China+Taiwan, while the other half is the rest of the world (obviously). The game is English though. The client, forums, devs, and other staff are largely English centered. But a large majority of songs are Japanese becaaaause...

All the beatmaps are community made. There are no 'official' maps. Japan has always been big on rhythm games, and the way their language is sung/spoken, lends itself well to these games. And Japan has the most users in osu. So a lot of the music in the game is in Japanese, NOT ALL, but a lot.

The client comes with one default "official" skin/theme, but users can customize the look of the game quite a bit.

Tell me about the gameplay
There's 3 kinds of objects that will appear on the screen while playing a beatmap.
Circles - You click on them.
Sliders - You click on them, keep holding it pressed and slide your cursor along the shape of the slider all the way to the end.
Spinners - You click anywhere on the screen, keep holding and spin your cursor around the center point of the spinner/screen (any direction is fine).

And that's it, that is literally all the things you'll have to deal with.

Tell me about the music
All beatmaps are community-made, and then volunteer moderators go through and select maps for 'ranked' status. Ranked maps have some degree of quality assurance, they've been deemed good enough for people to compete on so they get global leaderboards and players can get performance points by playing them.

Here's the bit where most of you will probably go "eeeeh I dunno about this".

A lot of the music in Osu is Japanese, and a significant chunk of those Japanese songs are from anime, or sounds like it could be from anime.
I don't/rarely watch anime so personally I'm not a big fan of all these cutesy pop anime beatmaps. Frankly I find the majority of them kind of embarrassing. But great news for me; there's literally thousands of other beatmaps that I can play instead.

When I first started playing Osu I really kept away from most japanese maps, but over time my tolerance for it has definitely gone up, these days I'll only refuse to play things that reaallly make me uncomfortable. There are levels of cute-anime-voices I cannot take, I can't handle it.

I feel I got sidetracked, the bottom line is: Japanese music has the quantity advantage. But there's no shortage of other music, instrumental, english, finnish, whatever you want. All categories come with their own spectrum of Great-Good-Decent-Bad-Awful

Tell me about the difficulty, this looks really hard! (helpful video clips here)
This game is hard, and IT NEVER BECOMES EASY, not ever. Nope.
I'm joking of course, but what I mean is there is always harder things to play, always. You never beat the game. And that's a good thing, it makes it so you set your own goals, and not chasing pointless milestones some developer put in to measure success.
The charm of this game is that it pushes you to become better, and you see improvements very quickly! And that is dangerously addictive.
If you look back at how you played a week earlier in your first few months of play you will actually see drastic improvements, it's almost scary, but also extremely fun.

However, it starts accessible for everyone. The easiest maps are super easy.

I've compiled a small videolist to show difficulty progression. Each clip is about 13 seconds, played by me except the last two:
Difficulty|Link|Comment
Easy| http://puu.sh/8EnjH.webm |There's things easier than this too!
Easy| http://puu.sh/8EnnF.webm
Normal| http://puu.sh/8Enq7.webm
Hard| http://puu.sh/8EntM.webm
Hard| http://puu.sh/8EnvN.webm
Insane| http://puu.sh/8Enyz.webm
Insane| http://puu.sh/8EnBY.webm
Extra| http://puu.sh/8EnJf.webm | Played by rrtyui. Currently the best player in the world
Beyond Extra| http://puu.sh/8EnZz.webm | Played by Happystick. This is basically inhuman.
There's lots of things in between these, but that would make the list unfeasibly long.

Other Useful things, information.
Have a look in the options menu before playing. My recommendations are to turn off "Combo Bursts". And turn off "Background Video".
Set the "Background Dim" to 95% or more. At 100% dim all kind of hype flashing from combos are disabled. You WANT to dim the background for sure.
Turn on the hit error "score metre type", this puts a colored bar at the bottom of your screen telling you if you're clicking too early or too late.
Turn on "Ignore all beatmap skins", "use skin's sound samples" and "always use skin cursor" if they aren't on already.

If you're playing with mouse, make sure you don't have any mouse acceleration active. Windows has it by default, so if you've never done a registry edit to remove it, you have mouse acceleration. It's absolutely impossible to build a muscle memory with that shit on.
http://donewmouseaccel.blogspot.se/2010/03/markc-windows-7-mouse-acceleration-fix.html just get the file at the top of this blog, the first link.

If you want to use a custom skin (you do) here are some suggestions:
shameless plug- my own homemade skin https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1281220/osuskin/Ravidge Skin HD - v4.4.osk (seen in the videos in this post)
Black 2014 http://osu.ppy.sh/forum/t/194902
Aesthetic Skin https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/t/189843
You can mix elements from any skin and Frankenstein your own creation, or draw them yourself, making skins is easy.

Hotkeys:
z, x - click on objects with your keyboard.
c - smoke, basically you get to draw on the screen in glorious mspaint quality.
spacebar - skips the intro of songs.
Scrollwheel - adjust Universal Volume
Scrollwheel+shift+ctrl - adjust Universal Volume in song selection
F7 - cycles through FPS limiters.
F8 - brings up chat and all chat tabs (stay away from #osu, it's cancer)
F9 - brings up chat and the list of users.
F12 - Screenshot
Shift + F12 - Screenshot and auto upload to puush.

Do you need to be a musician or rhythm master to play this game? Absolutely not.

That's a lot of text huh. Anyway, get more info and content at
http://osu.ppy.sh/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Osu!
http://www.reddit.com/r/osugame/

I put a lot of effort into this post, probably more than I should have. I wonder if anyone is even gonna read it. Or even try/play the game.
 
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Lenny

L2: Junior Member
May 2, 2013
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Major props for using webm files, Ravidge.

osu is definitely a difficult game, but apparently it helps with aiming... so you can always play a game or two of osu before playing a hitscan class in TF2 to assist. Never tried it myself, though.

Is it okay to share videos of other people playing osu here? I have a pretty good friend who I've been wanting to show off.
 

Ravidge

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May 14, 2008
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I created them and then uploaded.

Oh and as a neat trivia fact, both Puush and Osu is developed/created by the same guy.
 

Ravidge

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May 14, 2008
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Arguably the hardest map, or one of the hardest (ranked) got a new #1 today. Freedom Dive [FOUR DIMENSIONS].

There's been quite some fighting over the top slot on it for the past weeks. rrtyui set a Full Combo on it just a week ago, the second person to ever do so, the first being Cookiezi (RIP, scores removed), rrtyui had close to 1300 plays/attempts on the map when finally FCing it with 97.57% accuracy.

Today, CptnXn a german mouse+keyboard player (very rare in the absolute top % of players) managed a 99.23% acc full combo. After a staggering 1716 plays. Yeah this map is hard.

He was livestreaming on twitch as well, here is the VOD http://www.twitch.tv/cptn_xn/c/4234876 - (youtube)
Video Description

HOLY SHIT YES FINALLY FPHSFGOIHASIOPFHSJIOFHNASOIFHSOUIFHSUIOFHNIO

1716 attempts
 
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Sep 19, 2010
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I'm going to give it a go. I remember someone (probably you) linking to a video awhile back in chat and it kind of peaked my interest. Just never got around to it.

Edit: Just played it for about an hour. Yep, I'm in trouble.
 
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Ravidge

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May 14, 2008
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If you stick with it you'll have many hours of free entertainment ahead.

Today's content: how to have shit accuracy while desperately trying to keep the combo intact. (and then dropping it before the pause)
http://puu.sh/8TDy8.webm
A textbook example
If it's unclear, accuracy refers to how well you time your hits, not the cursor aim.


Also I've been thinking I should maybe host a multiplayer lobby for new tf2m players sometime if there's interest. I could easily pick out a newbie friendly songlist and play for an hour or two. I realize it's not the easiest game to get into if you have no one to play with, show scores to, or compete against. So if people think they might wanna try the game, hosting a gameday of sorts would be fine.
 

Ravidge

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May 14, 2008
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One thing I've noticed about this game is it's very unforgiving. Miss once or twice and you're in trouble.

It depends on how you approach the game.

If your goal is to pass songs that pushes your ability to the max then sure you will be playing songs where the BPM, HP and OD settings are too high for your skill level, and mistakes will be made and you will probably struggle or die super fast, a handful of misses in a row as you said.
You get performance graphs that look like this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1281220/2014-05/Screenshot-2014-05-21_02.28.18.jpg

The more common way to play the game is to aim for great execution, getting S rank full combos on maps that don't push you to your absolute limits but instead challenge you to be consistent and to keep your nerves under control. (as a side note, this is what you wanna do if you're looking to climb world ranking)
You get performance graphs that look like this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1281220/2014-05/Screenshot-2014-05-21_02.28.56.jpg

Both are valid ways to play the game, but doing the former will get you a lot of cases where you just die or are fighting for your life. But they are great for improving your skill in general, each time you fail and get further you're getting "better".
You should do a little bit of both, they are both extremely rewarding when you reach your goal (cleared vs S rank FC).
 

Ravidge

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May 14, 2008
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Thread is ded.
Over the week(s) there's been a little osu play from tf2m people in multiplayer lobbies. not much but eh, at least one or two have tried it. The maps we're playing in these lobbies are suuuper easy (1.00-1.50 stars difficulty)


I've made 2 new videos of not-so-easy stuff. I passed these quite hard unranked maps.
http://youtu.be/Ksu5R6Ezxck Reol - +danshi [Akali's Extra] 3.75 stars
http://youtu.be/UqM1_5WFqgk BABYMETAL - MEGITSUNE [BluOxy's Challenging] 3.67 stars
For both, the last quarter is the hardest part. But they're hard throughout, slip and you can die anywhere. Takes some consistency to pass these and I BARELY made it, pretty happy with it.
 

wareya

L420: High Member
Jun 17, 2012
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I am never going to be able to play this game at that level with a mouse.
 

Micnax

Back from the dead (again)
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Apr 25, 2009
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I loooooove Ouendan 1 + 2 and Elite Beat Agents on the DS because of how the controls work compared to other rhythm games, but I can't for the life of me ever manage to play it to the same level on the computer, it just feels too weird.

If there was a DS homebrew port I'd play the hell out of it.
 

Ravidge

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May 14, 2008
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I loooooove Ouendan 1 + 2 and Elite Beat Agents on the DS because of how the controls work compared to other rhythm games, but I can't for the life of me ever manage to play it to the same level on the computer, it just feels too weird.

If there was a DS homebrew port I'd play the hell out of it.
No DS versions. Just iphone and windows phone stuff. android is in dev.

I'm not surprised it feels weird. It'd be strange if it didn't... When I first started osu I was the worst. But I played multiplayer with 2 people for like 5 hours that first day and it really helped me enjoy my failures, and by the end of it I was actually passing maps.

You should have no expectations about your level of play. Osu is a different game. For a beginner, just passing easy maps is great progress.

But since you mentioned EBA, I have an excuse to link this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfxQtd4EDCc
This is as close to eba as you can get with osu, haha... The mapping style feels so old compared to what's being made these days. (if you're curious, that one is rated as Hard with 2.04 star rating)


I am never going to be able to play this game at that level with a mouse.
Why not? It's not like I'm some sort of super player. In fact I'm pretty bad (for real, have you seen the actual good players play, hooooly shit).

I've played for about 8-9 months now, and this game is the one that's challenging my mouse precision the most in all of my gaming history. It's really fun to see how far you can push yourself.

Edit: I bet that if anyone (literally anyone) spent as much time as I've done on this game, they'd be just as good or more likely- better than me.
 
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Ravidge

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May 14, 2008
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Great news! The in-game star rating system has been fixed/implemented so now this list makes sense. (Previously it said I had 5000 5-star maps. Everything was 5 stars in the previous system).

This is great, because now new players can actually find songs they can beat. And I can also pick better songs for the skill level in our multiplayer lobbies instead of having to guess.

I also changed my star graphic to a bar. Beautiful.