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1 Nov 2022
osu!monthly, October 2022
osu!monthly, October 2022
BOO! Did we get ya? No? Oh well, we still have the monthly news that you can read through to catch up with the community.
Welcome to the 4th edition of osu!monthly, now with a new halloween themed banner (thank you Hubz)!
While we are all currently focused on the osu! World Cup, we feel like it'd be good to take a look back at the month of October and see what else has been happening around the community. That being said, OWC will be covered in great detail next month.
If you want to contribute feel free to reach out! You can find us over at the osu!dev Discord server, or you can reach out to 0x84f#0001 on Discord.
If you are interested in checking out all of the previous editions feel free to look at our forum thread!
Table of contents
What's new in osu!(lazer)
It may be the spookiest month of the year, but the osu! dev team has stayed calm & collected and delivered an impressive amount of updates.
Cursor smoke trails are back! Feel free to show us your drawings in the comments, if you're the creative type.
In other news, a new mod titled Freeze Frame has been added. It changes gameplay by making all objects in a combo load in at once, then slowly zooms in each approach circle sequentially, emulating a form of low approach rate. Words don't really do it justice, so make sure to check it out in osu!(lazer) today if you enjoy challenging your reading skills.
Also, the leaderboards are finally visible during solo play and osu!(lazer) has received a few more adjustments in order to make it "feel" the same as stable.
The new Argon skin has received several updates and is now implemented for osu!catch and osu!mania, with osu!taiko being the last remaining game mode to receive its turn. For skins in general, a new "longest combo" counter has been added to the available combo HUD components, so now you will be able to track your longest combo even without having the leaderboard visible.
The editor has been a big focus for many quality of life enhancements during October, with examples like updated visuals and shortcuts for the settings, which should feel more at home in osu!(lazer)'s general appearance. Ongoing work by OliBomby, ekrctb and others cover a large number of bugfixes and general improvements to overall performance. Mapping in osu!(lazer) only gets better by the week!
One thing you might've not known is that osu!(lazer) has recently implemented full tablet support without any external drivers required! This means that tablets are fully plug & play with lazer, so say goodbye to needing to use special utilities for tablet area and the like. While osu!(lazer) does not have plugin support for tablet drivers as some 3rd party drivers do, this is currently the fastest and easiest way to set up a tablet for osu!. It just works!
Of course, we were not able to cover everything from the patch notes, so if you are interested in all previous and future patch notes, you can find them here, or if you'd rather watch a video digest of them check out the video embedded above!
Community recap
If you haven't already heard, EGTS is an osu!taiko tournament hosted by _yosh, TaikoMom, Briesmas, and Kasumi-sama. It is considered to be the host to some of the highest level of tournament play in osu!taiko, featuring fully custom songs throughout the mappool and a fully custom pool of charts. Speaking of custom songs, the Grand Finals tiebreaker for the tournament is an amazing collaboration featuring help from all corners of the osu!taiko community with 10 artists, 22 mappers, and many others.
Congratulations to the podium winners of this tournament as well! If you want to listen to all the custom songs featured in this tournament, head over to the GTS Youtube channel.
Set up by the osu! University, the osu! improvement month is a big event that ran throughout the whole of October and featured many activities geared around learning to improve and enjoying the process, such as interviews of top players, King of the Hill games, grouping people into randomized squads of 8, and much more.
A system of daily forms was also set up that encouraged players to share details of their osu! sessions, and upon submitting 10 or more of these, they were entered into a raffle to win an osu! keypad. Check them out on Discord if you're interested in any future events!
If you missed the top player interviews, don't worry, the replays are here for you!
DreamJam is an offline osu! meetup & tournament in Singapore, hosted by megumic and _gt. The event welcomed more than 90 attendees in the Dreamcore Showroom, making it the largest osu! meetup to date in Singapore.
The event featured a Tandem King of the Hill Tournament, with the fun and challenging concept of having one person control the keyboard while the other controls the mouse or tablet. The highlight of the event, however, was a Battle Royale featuring Singapore's osu! World Cup roster, including top Singaporean players such as GSBlank, Eagle5324 and the eventual champion, Demonical.
Please note that the osu! team is not affiliated with Dreamcore Private Limited and Matrix. Special thanks to Coppertine for the video.
Missed the event, but still want to catch the action? The stream, complete with live footage and commentary, can be found on the osu!sg Twitch channel.
As expected every year, the Halloween 2022 Fanart Contest is here. It is through the theme of Halloween that the best artists of the community have competed to make the most beautiful drawing (or rather the spookiest). A theme that everyone knows but that allows so many possibilities can only give gorgeous creations!
19 entries ended up making it to the main menu, with a piece by Dreamxiety attaining the top spot with 3749 votes for her third consecutive art contest victory (never before achieved by anyone) and her fifth triumph overall.
From the 29th of October onwards, the finalist entries were available to witness in their horrifying majesty in-game, but if you're reading this later on, check them all out from the contest results news post instead.
The Twitter poll
It all started on October 13th when the Twitter account OSURGC (Rhythm Games Club at the Ohio State University), launched a poll to elect the best rhythm game. After several polls through the days, osu! was in the finals versus Beat Saber, which maintained a very even 50/50 throughout most of the voting phase.
After Beat Saber reset the bracket (they came from losers finals) the poll took on a whole new dimension with many of the most important people in osu! and Beat Saber urging people to "save their game" by retweeting the message to win this fierce duel. At the end, osu! won the final and was voted the best rhythm game by the OSURGC, thanks to the entire community on Twitter.
This small but seemingly insignificant poll brought together a lot of players from different rhythm game communities and gathered almost 58k votes. We hope that other small events like this one can emerge in the future, to gather the osu! community and other games around common passions!
Remember though, while this was just a bit of fun in the polls, we're all rhythm gamers at heart whether we click circles, slice cubes, smack square buttons, hit arrows with our feet, or violently thrash on flimsy plastic guitars. The rhythm gaming community has never been as big and vibrant as it is today, so why not consider checking out some of the other games featured in the polls to broaden your horizons a bit?
Notable osu! plays of the month
Section written by Pisapou
What happens when the #1 osu! player plays an iconic map with DT? mrekk showed us the answer this month with an unbelievable HDDT FC on Cycle Hit!
You may think that mrekk would have been satisfied with this legendary score... but no, he also got the first HDDTHR pass on the same map, and a new miss count record on Trinity Homerun with HDDT. By the end of October he also set a new HR PP record with the FC on Shinkou wa Hakanaki Ningen no Tame ni ~ Jehovah's YaHVeH. In short, mrekk has not stopped proving this month that he deserves his #1 spot.
Notable osu!taiko plays of the month
Section written by ianpep
4 years ago, this map was veto'd for being impossible to FC. People at the time thought it was impossible, too hard for any player to ever achieve the FC, however they were proven wrong.
After being ranked for over 3 years, the living legend applerss has FC'ed Scattered Faith! Being 8 minutes long and reaching up to a BPM of 380 near the ending, this map is well deserving of its 9.07 star difficulty, not even mentioning the 1/6th bursts plus an overall BPM of over 500! The replay is an amazing sight to see as well, please watch it if you have the time!
Some other notable plays this month include shinchikuhome's Chronostasis DT FC, earning them 982 pp along with both #1 on the map, and #1 global! Congratulations aswell to EGTS runner-up, Grape_Tea who also set an insane NFHDHR SS on The Limit Does Not Exist, worth 922 pp!
Notable osu!catch plays of the month
Section written by Patatitta
ExGon has emerged from the shadows once again and set what might be one of the most meta-breaking plays in the entire game, getting an HRFL SS on the top diff of ded_ED, a 30 second long, CS 9.1, AR 0 map maxed out with the tightest jumps you can imagine. You just have to see it to believe it.
Don't let this play steal all of the spotlight, as October held more crazy score-based surprises, like the first S rank on the top difficulty of HUG & KILL set by Motion, dominating one of the fastest maps in catch the beat, or yet another high CS play by ExGon obtaining a full combo on his own map Broken Hearts with FL, setting the first FC on the map (even while counting NM or HT).
Notable mania plays of the month
Section written by RandomeLoL
It took them many, many tries. Months went by and their Perfect counts kept decreasing, but at the very beginning of the month BossPlays managed to do what everyone else was only able to dream of: the very first 1 million score on The Lost Dedicated.
For the unaware, Zyph's The Lost Dedicated is a very infamous chart, not quite to the point of the original .bms file it was based on, but still notorious in the 4K VSRG community nonetheless. The importance of this achievement may not be fully conveyed within these two paragraphs, but we hope they will encourage more players to set more magnificent plays such as this one!
Did you know?
Since 2012 and until very recently, the longest osu! ranked map was Armin's set on The Unforgiving by Within Temptation with a total drain time of 45 minutes. But this long kept record has been beaten recently by Nokduro and his osu!taiko set of DigitalOffline0011 Hayakore Tatsumi by Hayakore Tatsumi, which runs for a whopping 57 minutes of total drain time.
If we also include loved maps, katacheh's map for Nana Party by Nanahira has the longest run time of any of osu! beatmap with a total drain time of 178 minutes. You can fit the Bee Movie in that kind of time frame twice.
Monthly community quiz
Congratulations to Karol Duchon for being the first person to answer last month's question and score themselves 1 month of osu!supporter! As promised last month, we will be providing the answer to last month's question — "Who rewrote the medal system in 2016?".
The answer was: MillhioreF!
This month we've prepared a themed question (thanks chromb!), and that question is:
What symbol of halloween went extinct in early 2015, and what did they drop after their reincarnation?
As is customary by now, the first person with the correct answer in the comments will receive 1 month of supporter, and if no one answers by the 1st of December the prize will no longer be claimable. Good luck!
Things to look out for in November
- After twelve editions of the osu! World Cup, the thirteenth iteration is underway until the end of November. Make sure not to miss the biggest official tournament of the year, the matches of which you can find on the official Twitch channel!
- Are you are an osu!taiko mapper and want to show your talent to the whole community by mapping featured artist music? Then don't waste a second and take a look at the osu!taiko Featured Artist Cup, the biggest osu!taiko mapping showdown of the year!
- Ephemeral has shared a sneak peek of a new Hush-Hush medal in the Medal Hunters Discord, this led to some community datamining from which 3 more beatmap pack medals were uncovered! This indicates that there is a high possibility of a new batch of medals that will be going live soon!
- The second iteration of OTMT (osu!taiko Malaysia tournament) is currently underway! For this iteration the tournament organizers really stepped their game up with commissioned songs, custom maps, and even a mascot! The tournament is currently in the quarterfinals stage so if you like bashing drums yourself or just watching the bashing take place, head over to their Twitch channel.
End word
Thank you for sticking along with us for the 4th edition of osu!monthly. We hope you are satisfied with the amount and quality of content we deliver, and if you are not we expect for you to let us know in the comments. The osu!monthly team wishes you a happy Halloween and all of the upcoming holidays, no matter where you are!
—0x84f, ianpep, Pisapou
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