Warning, unfinished and probably boring


My first proper introduction to rhythm games was mid 2016 through the agdq stepmania showcase on youtube. I thought the game looked really interesting so I downloaded it and started playing, eventually switching over to osu!mania after a few months. I picked up a few mobile rhythm games like Cytus, Lanota, a bunch of stuff, along the way. While continuing with mania, I started developing an interest in very targetted multi finger play in these mobile games. Like, purposefully including the pinky/ring finger, learning how to hit patterns with the entire hand. This had a major influence in how I later picked up osu!touchscreen.

I continued to run through osu!mania. I eventually was fc'ing high 4* low 5* 4k maps by around mid 2017. Sadly my laptop screen broke that July. I couldn't play on the machine until we turned it in for repairs, so I was outta luck. I had a pretty crappy backup laptop, one that also had touchscreen on it, so I began to play on that once I found it a few weeks later.

I was vaguely aware of players like Mafham and Exgon prior to this series of events. People played touchscreen on Osu!Standard. It was cool, but I'd never really looked into it. however, around when I started playing on the touchscreen laptop, I become more interested. I developed a feel for the general community consensus surrounding TD. It wasn't a good one. TD was a gimmick device, it was inherently one trick and most maps were impossible. I'd read on forums how TD was worse than mouse and tablet, that TD wasn't viable. As a osu!standard noob, this seemed really stupid. you have 10 fingers with TD, of course its better, you can just click more. I know now that ‘clicking more’ isn’t so easy, but that was the start of my journey with touchscreen. To prove that consensus wrong.

I began touchscreen play around the end of July 2017 and primarily played 3 stars with the specific goal to always switch fingers between notes. The point was to develop a playstyle that allowed touchscreen to both stream and aim at very high levels which pure single tapping doesn’t allow. I specifically avoided higher star maps in order to focus on the technique and fundamentals of this playstyle, not that I ever got that far. I was quite bad for quite a long time, largely due to steep learning curves for multifinger. About 4 months into my journey the touchscreen broke. I was semi consistent at triplets and 5-bursts, but still missed often. My accuracy was still awful, streams were impossible. And now I had to stop. At that time I still had a ton of drive to push the playstyle. I genuinely believed it was an untapped goldmine of play potential, one that just needed a more time invested. Touchscreen osu would root itself in my mind as something to one day come back to.

It was mid november of 2017 when I came back to osu!mania. I tried playing 4k for a while, but it didn't have the same luster as before. I got back to a decent level of skill, my best level of skill actually, but I eventually moved over to 7k instead. I just lost interest in the mode. It was the last time I seriously invested in 4k mania and I've to this day (August 2021) never reached that same level of skill. I was around rank 8k at this point, and I've only been decaying since. I began playing 7k and it was fun,but again I couldn’t keep with it, eventually stalling on the mode as well. I dabbled with taiko for a brief moment, that ended, and that was it. I was still mentally stuck on osu!touchscreen. Its what I wanted to pursue but I had nothing to play it on, so I focused my rhythm game play on things which would hopefully benefit my touchscreen ability once I could play it again.

I began playing 10k on osu, one because it was fun, but two, because it would increase my overall finger independence, which would help me if I ever started playing osu!touchscreen again. I started playing more mobile rhythm games, OverRapid being a main one, but I'd only ever play them one handed, switching out hands every single map, one cause it was fun, but two because it would help develop finger mobility if I ever got back into osu!touchscreen. This went on for a looong time. I was a but obsessed, and for a year, all the way until July of 2019, I was in this rut. I loved rhythm games, but no game struck a passion in me except one I couldn’t play. I was obsessed with improvement, but there was nothing to improve at, except side games that I had no interest in except as stepping stones. I wanted to play osu!touchscreen, to evolve the playstyle into what I genuinely thought it could become. I was stuck in this rut for almost a year, until mid 2019 where I discovered something interesting is osu!taiko. This next section is a bit tangential, but still part of my journey as a player


Back quite a few months, the Christmas of 2018, I got my first mechanical keyboard as a present. It was pretty nice, I could use it to play 10k on mania, and of course use it to play other games as well. Lets take it back to July 2019. I was still passively interested in taiko, and I'd mess around on it sometimes. I still thought the idea of 6k taiko interesting. It however was too lopsided. 4 fingers on one hand and 2 on the other just felt wrong. I'd try and find ways to play it with 3 and 3 fingers each hand, but it just didn't really work. Something eventually clicked however. The mouse buttons in taiko don't actually act as a 5th and 6th input, they press the same key as the 1st and 2nd input on keyboard. So... what if one just double up'd there fingers and used the same key for input 1 and 5, for input 2 and 6. And if we go this far one could also add 2 more fingers and double up for input 3 and 7. and 4 and 8. Wait a minute, turn the keyboard vertically, bring a hand around on each side and use both hands on keys, lets say, w e r t, and now you've got an even handed 8k playstyle for osu!taiko. This looked interesting.

November 5th -