Before anything, I send a greeting and happy new year to all readers !. Well, continuing with my first post of the year, I came to recommend you a game that has been quite addictive for me lately, osu !.
Osu! is a rhythmic game of music in which you must press the circles once or hold down the sliders that appears on the screen by placing the mouse cursor over them at the correct moment, and of course, following the beat of the track. Something that seems simple but can get very complicated as the difficulty rises.
This is how standard or classic mode works, there are 3 other game modes (practically I have not played anything of them) that would be the Taiko, Mania and Catch the Fruit that are played only with the keyboard. Therefore I will focus on showing you the standard version of the game and give you some tips in case you are interested in trying to play excellent game :).
</pThe game has many anime and j-pop songs that I personally like a lot, but there is music for all tastes and colors from rock, electronic, pop, hip-hop etc, since anyone can make your own map of the song you want with the .mp3 file of the song.
Basic Concepts
First I would like to explain some of the basic concepts of the game that are not taught in the in-game tutorial.
- Beatmaps: for each song you have to download your map from the osu page! this comes in .osz format, once downloaded, double click on it and osu! will open to install the beatmap (if you have it open it will be updated)
- Streams: they are chains of very close circles. They can be long chains or simply several sets of 2, 3 or 5 circles (burst streams).
- Jumps: is when the circles are widely separated and usually form patterns.
- Approach Rate (AR): It is the speed at which the circles appear, the higher the value, the shorter the reaction time is. It can go from 0 to 10
- Circle Size (CS): It is the size of the circles (obvious xD). The higher the value, the smaller the circle, making it more difficult to press. It can go from 2 to 7.
- Overall Difficulty (OD): It is the size of the precision meter (life bar), the higher the figure the smaller the size of the meter so it is required to be more accurate. It can go from 0 to 10.
- Health Points (HP): It is the constant draw of the life bar in a beatmap, the higher the figure the faster it will drain. It can go from 0 to 10.
- Difficulty: The stars indicate the level of difficulty of the map 1 * is easy, 2 * normal, 3 * hard and so on… the Korean levels are from 5 * and more stars xD.
Knowing the value of CS, AR, OD and HP has the song that we are going to play is quite useful to be aware of where our game level limit is and to be able to look for maps with similar values and perhaps a little higher.
Beginner Tips
- Download many songs, as much as you can, preferably packs of several songs together and you will try them little by little.
- Do not "retry". The constant retry can be frustrating and you can’t improve your own reflex but you memorize a specific map.
- Use the sensitivity of the mouse that you feel most comfortable, you can change at any time in the settings of the game. Keep in mind that the less sensitivity, the more accurate you will be.
- To improve you’ll have to be constant and play a lot. There is no shortcut to be good at osu! from morning to night, it is about playing the songs in the difficulty that you can and little by little increasing the difficulty.
- Configure the graphics in the game settings so that you have less than 5ms preferably.
- Download a good skin. The default skin of the game is very bad it has many colors and animations that distract when playing. Personally I use one called YUGEN you can download it here
- Try playing in the multiplayer. It is much more fun than playing alone and you get the chance to know people who can give you advice to improve.
Ranking
Once you know the basics of the game you can try to play ranked beatmaps to climb in the ranking ladder of the game. There are currently more than 11 million registered users in osu! of which are always connected an amount that goes up between 8-10 thousand players, these players rise in the ranking of osu! making good plays of maps that are ranked with an accuracy greater than 95% which will give them "performance points" (pp). The harder the song, the more points it will award. In your personal profile you can see how they have gone up in the ranking.
Personal Opinion
If you like music in general, you will like this game because of the great variety of genres that its songs library has. Thanks to osu! I have been able to meet several singers or idols, one of my favorites is a Japanese group called Reol I recommend them a lot. As I also like to watch anime when I get a song from an anime or a background that catches my attention I look for it to verify what anime it is, so it's good enough to maybe find some good anime.
Finally I hope you to give this game a chance, is totally free and once downloaded and installed the maps of the songs do not need internet to play by yourself. To start playing you just need to download the game and sign up here. My user in osu! es eycer1995 you can add me and if I am online I can teach you the basics I've learned since I do not have a lot of time in this game (3 months only) .
