Kujyou's McMath Tech Corner

Chapter 1 & 2

And once again, we're back! Anyways, I'll try to cover as much as I can on this post so we can move on. In this post I'll talk about the relevant easy mods and some, 'extra' stuff. The relevant ones are as follows. Easy, Half time and No fail. Most of the time, people don't use these as they lower your multiplier but if you're practicing an incredibly hard song (cough scarlet rose cough) or just screwing around, they're pretty cool. Easy is pretty much the opposite of hard rock, it makes everything well, easier. The circles and sliders are bigger and that's about it. Half time is the opposite of double time as well, it halves the bpm (beats per minute) and makes everything very, very easy. Of course it also makes the beatmap or song sound weird and last twice as long. Finally, there's no fail, which makes it impossible for you to fail. This is probably the only one that's used as people use this to practice the hard songs I mentioned. It's really nice to have when you're practicing so you don't fail immediately when you miss a note. People don't usually use these, 'mods' but they're there. It's nice to have and I'm glad they're implemented into the game.


Now that I've covered most of the stuff within the game (I think) I'm going to talk about some, 'advanced mechanics' or just terms used when people talk about this game. I'm not the best at this game, so this stuff is just my understanding of the terms. The first thing I'll talk about is, 'streaming'. How the term streaming came about, I have no idea. But this is seen fairly commonly nowadays. How streaming works is essentially putting a bunch of objects incredibly close to each other. The first object is about the same, but the next object will be almost immediately after the prior circle and so on. When the stream is short like 4-5 circles, it isn't so bad. When it gets very, very long it's insane and pretty unfair. I would describe that as around 20ish circles in a row. The difficulty with streaming is that you need to complete the stream almost immediately after it appears. When it gets long, obviously that's not the case but you still need to go at the same speed as before and it's very easy to drop your combo or get many "50's" or "100's". I would say streaming is pretty fair by osu! standards. There is something else called a, "deathstream" which is a stream that's even HARDER which is insane. I've never done one, I've probably seen a few and I don't want to do one. Not only are they incredibly long, they also have a weird pattern which makes the streaming process even harder. What I've heard of but never seen are, "Ninja spinners". They're spinners that pop up randomly during a beatmap just to screw you over. They're incredibly unfair and are probably gone by now. The difficulty or unfairness of this is that you need to start spinning right away after it pops up and even then the beatmap keeps going as if nothing was happening. It's very weird and it's almost impossible to keep your combo if you encounter one.

Well, I think this should end the series of posts about osu! I've been dragging this out for a while now, and I feel I should end it here. Although I haven't really covered EVERYTHING that there is to cover about osu! I guess I'll end it here. In case you still have stuff you have questions about, I'm sure the wiki/FAQ can answer it. Here's the link to that amazing place. Once again, I'm not the best of the best (in fact i'm pretty bad) but I think I have enough knowledge about the game to post stuff about it. I love this game and I think there's a lot of things to do in this game. It's pretty casual too. Well, until next time!

- Henry

Click here if you haven't read chapter 1

And we're back baby. Anyways, the next thing I'm going to talk about are skins on Osu! Skins are a neat little feature that's in the game. You can mod your game to look how you want and you can actually do some pretty neat things. For example, if you're playing some of the harder beatmaps, there are a lot of beats. You can remove all those numbers that pop up by skinning over it. It's possible by just replacing the numbers with a blank image. There's so much to skin in the game that it's almost a new game when you skin over everything you can. Almost every single thing in the game can be changed. The only exceptions is the title screen and multiplayer screen (which you can mod by donating). The other thing that's pretty notable are combo-bursts. They're a small image that pops up every time you reach a fifty hit combo. It's a pretty cool feature that they implemented. However the thing that's really cool is that you can mod that too. So if you have a favourite character from an anime (they usually end up looking the best) or something similar, you can have that character pop up when you get a combo-burst!

The other thing I want to talk about are the mods in the game. The ACTUAL mods. The difficulty multipliers are as follows : Hard Rock, Double time/Nightcore, Sudden Death/Perfect, Hidden and Flashlight. Hard rock multiplies your score by 1.06x, and the difficulty increase is that the song gets well..harder. It makes the beats smaller and they're in harder to reach places. The next one is double time, which doubles the speed the song is. Of course this also makes everything twice as fast including the song itself and the beats. Nightcore does the exact same thing except it makes the song sound as if Alvin and chipmunks were singing it. The multiplier for both of these are 1.12x. Sudden Death is where if you miss a single beat, you fail the song as the name implies. Perfect is even more unforgiving as it makes you get a perfect on every single beat. This means you have to get an SS rank no matter what. However, the thing about this mod is that you don't get any score multiplier for doing this and is only a fun thing to do. The next mod is hidden. This makes everything essentially invisible. You do get a cue for each beat but they pop up for a second then disappear right away. The multiplier you get for this mod is 1.06x once again but a cool thing about this mod is that it's the requirement for the silver S and silver SS ranks. Finally, we have flashlight. This is probably the hardest mod of the three as it makes your entire screen (except an area) black. The only area that is not blacked out is around your cursor essentially making it a, "flashlight". It requires you to pretty much memorize the entire beatmap and play it like that. The multiplier for this is 1.12x.

This still isn't everything! I'll have one more post about this, next time! So until then, stay tuned for the next chapter!

-Henry

      Whether you listen to music through a phone or a mp3 player, you'll probably have listened to it through your computer first. Something most gamers share is that they like listening to music while they play their game. There are various ways to listen to music while gaming. Off the top of my head, I can think of iTunes, Youtube, and Pandora. iTunes is an easy way to set up a playlist and just play songs. All it takes is just essentially a drag and drop of a .mp3 file. Youtube is also just as easy, but it might make you lag a bit if you set-up can't take it. Lastly, there's Pandora, which might be a bit harder for us in Canada to set up. You need to set up a proxy first, as Pandora doesn't like any other country other than the US. However if you can get through all of that, Pandora is a nice way of listening to music. Pandora is pretty much just a radio station, but it's still pretty good.

         Listening to music while playing the game is the exact same as doing homework or classwork while listening. It helps you focus on the task at hand. I'm not very good at gaming myself, but when I play a game like, "League of Legends" alone, I almost always have something playing in the background. It's a lot more refreshing than having the same sounds play almost every 10 seconds. Not only that, I feel that certain games do require a level of concentration. To somewhat prove my point, sometimes professional streamers will almost always have something playing in the background. That's it from me today, I bid you adieu.

-Henry

         Welcome to my first post! Since we're using a theme about a person, might as well make the first post about her! An introduction might be nice, don't you think? Anyways her name is Miku Hatsune. How is she in any way related to music? Well, she's a vocaloid. What's a vocaloid you ask? Well, a vocaloid is a program made Yamaha. Miku Hatsune uses both the Vocaloid 2 and Vocaloid 3 synthesizers. Miku Hatsune is made by Crypton Future Media. Miku Hatsune is basically a program that you can buy to produce music. You need to provide your own music, but Miku Hatsune is designed to sing.

          Nowadays, she's incredibly popular and there are few who don't know her if they browse the internet often. How she rose to popularity was thanks to a site called, "Nico Nico Douga". The site is the Japanese equivalent of Youtube. Through this site, she rose to popularity incredibly quickly. This site has a 'ranking' system which displays popular videos. When the Miku craze was still rampant, videos of her were almost always on that ranking. Amazingly enough, her influence spread to many other things such as games, manga and anime. Not only has Miku affected the Japanese market, she has also affected the west as well. I would be surprised to find a lot of people who don't know who Miku Hatsune is. To add onto her popularity, she's also had a couple of concerts as well, all of them being well-received. I think that just about sums up her, I hope you learned something!

-Henry