Need a valentine? osu!monthly's got you!
Welcome to the 8th edition of osu!monthly! Last month was February, the month of love, and what better way to express our love for osu! and its community than by procuring everything you may want to see? Unless, of course, you're one of those people who express their love for osu! by playing it for over 12 hours straight, in which case, carry on... we're not judging.
As always, the osu!monthly team tries to find content that you all would like to read and are generally interested about. BUT, we can't always catch everything, so if you want to see something in the monthly news or want to voice an opinion, please do not hesitate to let us know in the osu!dev Discord server.
With the semantics out of the way, let's dive on in and see what February scrounged up for us!
New in the month of February:
Check out the full changelog complete with images and comparison videos.
There was also an update that came out earlier today. While perhaps technically late for February, we decided to cover it anyway as an exception. Have a look at the latest osu!(lazer) update video above, or view the full changelog.
As always, there are a bunch of improvements made each release, but these were probably the few showstoppers you should know about.
By the way, did you know that you can enable storyboards on the main menu in osu!(lazer) with osu!supporter?
If you're curious, that was Kawa's storyboard for the nik's winter cup 2022 Grand Finals tiebreaker beatmap Sephid - OVERPROTECTION.
Another one of those osu! community meetings happened last month, almost a year since the last one. It was announced on Twitter by peppy to be held as a panel of experienced people in various community positions, including some top players, tournament organisers and people involved in osu! development.
While the next client version is most definitely in a usable state for most people, many aren't switching over due to a variety of reasons. Game mechanics are different, performance point leaderboards haven't stabilised and some features in osu!(stable) are missing.
This meeting was about osu!(lazer) game mechanics and balance, mainly covering the following topics:
View the summary document or the full VOD to get in on the conversation! (Literally. Go have a look at the discussion post in the forums.)
More meetings to make decisions about game mechanics in osu!(lazer) are expected. Follow @ppy on Twitter for updates.
As you probably know, many Discord bots are created by members of the community in order to make life easier for players or simply connect the osu! database with Discord. AxerBot is one of these bots, created by Hivie and Sebola, and which received an important update last month that will please numerous mappers
The bot now allows creating and displaying an audio file's spectrogram and fix any potential bloating issues, in addition to all its already existing features such as the ability to view many mapping and playing stats or having rich integration with the BN website. These kinds of bots will only impress us with new features making life easier from day to day, and we hope to see new ones soon!
A wonderful discovery last month is LeFerraille's YouTube channel, and its amazing and funny animations. This month in particular, a video called "Pippi is a tournament player" features Pippi and Default, two friends playing osu! and discussing tournaments while throwing references and jokes left and right. If you have four minutes to dedicate to this little creator, don't hesitate to go and have a look!
One milestone? Two milestones? How about three.
Once again, mrekk has surprised all of us with what he could do, as he FC'd the top difficulty of Nevo's rendition of THE ORAL CIGARETTES - Mou Ii kai?, something that many top players have attempted to do, and failed, with the closest attempts before being aetrna's 1-miss attempt from 2.5 years ago and Rimuru's 2 misses the very same month, making mrekk's play a good endgame score with its 10 stars of difficulty induced by 288 BPM streams with HDDT scattered across the map, as well as the huge jumps at the end.
You can witness it for yourself below:
However, that's only the tip of the iceberg. Although we have had many technical 10-star FCs, mrekk is the first player to ever achieve the 10-star Full Combo medal without using a touch device.
And lastly, before mrekk set the score shown above, he also set a score on THE ORAL CIGARETTES - 5150 with HDDT 4 minutes prior to the 10-star FC, in another map that requires high skill in both speed and consistency. The length of the map matters especially at 9.85 stars, not just speed, which makes this that much harder to FC.
No fancy video embed for this one unfortunately, but here's a link to the video of the play!
osu!taiko is well known for its high skill ceiling, with many top players clearing harder and harder songs as the years go by. This month, we are showing off 2 extremely difficult clears, both impressive in their own ways.
This first play, set by 4_4, is a true example of showing just how far the skill (and stamina!) ceiling can be pushed in this game. The song is a 45-minute compilation of Konpaku Seriels famous "Angel" set of difficulties on their maps, known for pushing difficulty far beyond many Ranked maps at the moment. This map features some of the hardest gameplay currently found in osu!taiko.
Some highlights for this map include brutal speed and stream sections reaching up to 400 BPM, which are still considered near impossible for players of any rank, and other difficult SV and tech sections that can put anybodies patience to the test. The play is just as impressive as it sounds, passing with much HP to spare and also with 91.80%. Enough talking though, please check out this very (long play) below!
Another play that excells at showing just how far this game can be pushed is applerss's NC clear on IOSYS - Scarlet Keisatsu no Ghetto Patrol 24-ji, an already speedy map brought to its absolute limit with the speed modifier. Although this map is only about a minute long, it's still nothing to scoff at, coming in at an insane 480 BPM and a star rating of 9.95. With this play applerss once again proves to the community that he is the undesputed god in speed, so please check out this record-breaking play out below!
rostld's SS on Reol - Asymmetry was a long time coming, as this map has seen some serious competition since it was first ranked in 2015. Even after so many tries by so many different players, an FC never happened. However, recently, a €50 bounty was set for the first person to obtain a full combo, and that's exactly what rostld did, finally laying this legendary map to rest.
Most of the greatest scores in the game happen in singleplayer, where a player can restart and retry as many times as they desire. However, that is not what happened this time. Top player roido set the first ever HD SS on Crim Nanakusa - dialnote during an AxS 8 tournament match. The nerve control required to set a score as good as this in an environment as competitive as this is truly unbelievable. If you are curious about how the match went down, check out the match history or the VOD below.
Much has happened in osu!mania last month, but here are some of the most exceptional highlights:
Back in early 2019, one of the most legendary scores in 4K was set by wonder5193 — an SS on the top difficulty in Yuyoyuppe - AiAe. This has stood unchallenged at the top of the leaderboard for 4 years... until now. This February Myuka popped off and grabbed the #1 on the leaderboard — even more impressively, he did it through sheer force of ratio as he missed the 100% by 3 200s. How can someone achieve such level of precision over the relentless quadstreams and longjacks? See for yourself:
This start of year has been spectacular for difficult maps in the Ranked section, both in 4K and 7K — but above all of them stands tyrcs's map of Lime - BEYOND. This is without a doubt the new hardest Ranked osu!mania map, replacing katagiri - STRONG 280, also by tyrcs (what a guy).
With only 7 passes after a month, the unrelentingly dense 276 BPM chordstreams of the top difficulty are a challenge unplayable for (almost) anyone, resulting in a short leaderboard topped by none other than currently reigning osu!mania 7K Champion - Kura -, who achieved an insane 810k S rank on this behemoth. Just watch below, but don't expect to understand much:
It doesn't stop there, because - Kura - also achieved the new osu!mania pp record, getting 1474 pp on Kry.exe feat. Ice - Last Wish — and he did it mere minutes after a historic win over South Korea in the MWC Semifinals. Truly extraterrestrial.
Much more has happened in this short month, but just to shout out a couple more plays:
Like every year, the Community Choice was held to reveal the beatmaps released last year that were preferred by players and mappers in all modes. It's never too late to take a look at the announcement news post, so don't hesitate!
To honour a handful of Beatmap Nominators who have stood out in the mapping or modding community, the Community Contributors 2022 were announced, naming fourteen new Elite Nominators who we definitely recommend you check out.
The Community Mentorship Program keeps helping people over the years and this year is no exception, with the announcement news post signalling the start of a new cycle. If you want to find a mentor to help you improve in any field, you have until March 6th to sign up!
The Twin Trials - Beatmapping Phase announced in early February is accepting beatmap submissions until March 15th, so if you want to participate, it's better late than never, but don't waste any more time!
We know it's impossible to agree on which beatmaps are the best and which are not, but we try to highlight the ones that are most talked about or that can appeal to the most people. However, it's normal to have a different opinion and that's why we invite you to look at all the beatmaps released recently and make your own opinion. (They're all great, really!)
The osu! website has received an update, more specifically now you can sort threads on the forums by their creation date, which should hopefully make your skin browsing experience much easier.
You know the drill by now. 3 skins hand-picked by the skinship team that were made in the past month will now be presented in glorious fashion for your eyes to feast on.
Check out all the skins highlighted with this showcase playlist below:
In the earliest osu! days, a separate program was used to update osu! called "osume". Besides its function of updating the game, skins that were deemed finished and of good quality were also made downloadable straight through the updater. Thanks to Kurboh for providing this cool osu! fact.
For the second month in a row, the quiz question for February has remained unanswered by anyone!
The correct answer was Reol - +Danshi, a Loved map where all of the map's objects are placed in a pleasing circle shape. As for why it is referred to as the circle of life... maybe consider asking your parents.
Now, on to this month's question:
What would the aristocracy have to do with osu!(lazer)?
chromb incorporated™ wishes everyone the best of luck in finding the answer to this THRILLING question and remember — there's a month of osu! supporter up for grabs for the first person to guess the correct answer!
We hope that you loved this edition of osu!monthly. As usual, if the content is not what you want to see or if you would like to contribute in any way possible, please visit the osu!dev Discord server or contact any of the members of the osu!monthly team. Until next time!
—osu!monthly team
thankya c:
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