My osu! Journey

For those unaware, osu! is a rhythm game that was created by a man known as peppy. osu! was originally created as a clone of some J slop for the DS, although it now supports four gamemodes. These gamemodes are as followed:

1. osu!standard, the “main” gamemode of osu! and the clone of the aforementioned J slop. This game can be played with a mouse and keyboard, but I recommend playing with a tablet and keyboard instead, as it is much easier. In this mode, you must click on circles on screen along with the music. There are also sliders, where you must hold the note and follow along with it and spinners, where you must VIOLENTLY and RAPIDLY spin your mouse/tablet as fast as possible.
2. osu!taiko, a gamemode which, much like osu!standard, is a clone of some arcade J slop where you must beat on a drum to the beat of the music. Unfortunately, I do not have a drum, so I have to use my keyboard instead. They make taiko drum controllers specifically for osu!taiko and other such games, although I have yet to get one. When I played osu! a lot, I was considering buying donkey konga bongos for use as my taiko controllers, but I have yet to do so.

3. osu!catch, a gamemode where you catch fruit to the beat? Yeah, I won't lie, this is a strange one. For a while, I dismissed it as weird and not worth my time, although after playing it I learned it actually takes a lot of skill for some of the harder songs
4. osu!mania, a gamemode where you press keys to the beat. The number of keys in any given song can range from one all the way to nine, although I only ever played 4K. I suppose it’s a clone of Dance Dance Revolution, that game that the Sandy Hook killer played, although nobody plays with a dance pad. The main focus of this blog post will be mania.

I originally found osu! in 2019 after I got tired of Robeats, the shitty Roblox version of osu!mania. Unfortunately, a game like Robeats could have never prepared me for osu!mania, because it kicked my ass. This only strengthened my resolve to improve at the game, however. And improve I did. I would slowly get better throughout the years, but emphasis on slowly. For a while, things were good.

Time passed and I never really had any reason to improve at the game other than for my own enjoyment, so I would start getting bored of osu!. I had far surpassed my friends who I once played with, but my skill at the game was also not improving anymore. Because of this and a few reasons, I stopped playing very consistently and would only play once every few months when I got the itch. According to the stats on my profile, I peaked about a year ago and haven't really played much since.

That now brings us to the current day. I got that “itch” today and impulsively decided to download the cutting edge version of osu!, osu!lazer. In the process of doing this, I noticed that osu!’s domain, osu.ppy.sh, is a subdomain. Realizing that I could visit ppy.sh, I did so and found some of peppy’s dead projects. One of them called up.ppy (NSFW) is seemingly just a dead imageboard(?) that gets spammed with porn every once in a while.

Once I actually got onto osu!lazer, I realized it was just osu! with quality of life changes. I liked the UI and disliked the default skin. It seems that they are committed to making everything that involves osu! available within the osu! client, which is very cool. I also found out that I’m absolutely TERRIBLE at the game now! I was actually so embarrassed by my gameplay that I decided to leave it out of the blog post. I was so terrible, in fact, that I feel a new resolve to get better at osu!. But not just osu!mania, but osu!standard too. Maybe osu!catch and osu!taiko (if I can get those konga bongos that is).

At the time of writing (October 17th, 2023) my global ranking on osu!mania is #273,324. I can’t even give you my rank for osu!standard at the moment because I have no recent plays, but it's low, trust me. My global rank on osu!catch is #73,179, if that matters. I will improve. In the future, I might make an update if I make substantial progress, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I must get back to staring at the scantily clad anime waifus on the main menu of osu!. Thanks for reading!