Aspire V closes, and amidst the wake of the most creative maps this contest series has ever seen, we welcome not one, but two new Elite Mapper: Aspirants!
Update 2020-08-26: The names of the Grand Awards have been updated to better reflect their prize tier.
The finals stage of Aspire V saw 14 unique maps, each chosen as the best of their categories, take to the stage one last time to win the Grand Aspire award. However, we've decided to throw in one final surprise!
Several voices have called out to credit the entries most favourited by mappers, and we hear you. So, we are proud to present a new award: the Mapper's Pick award!
The Mapper's Pick is awarded to the map which received the most votes from ranked mappers. If you have at least one ranked beatmap at the time voting closed, then your vote would have counted towards the Mapper's Pick. The rewards for the Mapper's Pick are the same as the Grand Award's. This new award won't affect anything for the Grand Aspire award, which will counts everyone's votes including mappers.
So without further ado, here are the winners of Aspire V:
Taking the lead with 1687 votes is an entry utilising a beautiful fusion of mapping and storyboarding by Mr HeliX. Time Traveler offers a decent challenge featuring a mix of difficult streams and overlapping sliders, all alongside a meticulously crafted storyboard that gives you a true sense of travelling through time!
Playing this map will see you playing patterns forwards and backwards in time, and even through different versions of the game. It's a significant feat to create an Aspire map that is better experienced as a player rather than as a spectator, but this winning definitely pulls that off extremely well. Congratulations again to Mr HeliX!
Voted by 122 mappers and by far and away one of the most talked about entries of Aspire V was this entry by fanzhen0019. XNOR XNOR XNOR is a truly epic adventure of a beatmap, presenting over 9 minutes of jaw-dropping spectacles in the forms of slider patterns and exploits that, each carefully placed to highlight and augment the chaos the song itself presents.
Not only is this map a visual spectacle and a challenge for the budding player, there are also several secrets scattered throughout the map. Can you find them?
Being voted the second favourite for both the Community Pick and the Mapper's Pick is this creative entry by Meow Mix. Retro gamers will be familiar with the custom Dodge the Beat game mode that Space Invaders offers. The goal for this map, much like the original Space Invaders, is to dodge every object coming your way to obtain the lowest score possible. While this may sound like a simple task, you may find that attempting this will prove to be quite challenging.
Staying true to the theme of the song, as well as creating an extremely fluid rendition of the Dodge the Beat custom mode, this will definitely become a beatmap everyone will tell you to experience at least once.
A full list of placings and map links can be found here.
This iteration of Aspire has been quite the journey. We've received a total of 63 entries, which while a little less than expected, has featured some of the most creative entries we've seen to date. Out of these entries, a total of 27 different artists and 49 songs were used.
Once again we'd like to give a huge thanks to our category selectors, pishifat, Zelq, Nuvolina, Feerum, Unpredictable, Yumeno Himiko, Doomsday, and jackylam5. I'd also like to give a thanks to heyronii, who helped with processing the beatmaps from entry to distribution.
The enormous range of creativity and variety this iteration of Aspire has produced has been truly great to see - the changes we've made for this contest have proven to be positive. However, we know that the contest in its current format is far from perfect, and there are several things we've identified that could be improved.
The next Aspire contest won't be happening for a while, but we will be building upon things we've learnt this contest to make the next one even better. We realise that Aspire is a significant event in your calendars, whether you're a mapper or a spectator. Therefore we want to continue improving the contest series as much as possible. If you have any feedback or criticisms in the meantime, feel free to send them our way.
Until next time.
— -Mo-
man ur just tilted subway deserved their michelin stars
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