Mania: My Journey Thus Far

Thursday, April 25th, 2024

As I suspected, my first post here was immediately followed by a long period of silence. I tend to overexcite and thus overestimate my activity. In any case, today's article regards a topic very dear to me: rhythm gaming. My love for mania-styled games (presently Etterna and Interlude) has grown in recent months, but before speaking on that I must first relate my history with the rhythm genre itself, and how it affected my life.

Fitting Beginnings

My first proper introduction to rhythm games was Parappa the Rapper 2. This is an interesting coincidence as, besides some obscure NES game I forgot the name of, Parappa the Rapper (the first game) was the first acknowledged rhythm game release. The gameplay itself is pretty simple and unrefined, consisting of one horizontal lane at a time, with button icons along its length; a cursor styled as the character's head traverses the lane, and you must press corresponding buttons as the cursor passes over them. I don't think the game pushed me to try others of its kind, but it felt worth mentioning given its history.

Goodbye Wrists

For my early teenage years, I was unreasonably obsessed with Virtual Reality software. This culminated in thousands of hours spent between Anyland (which I will post about eventually), Echo Arena, and Beat Saber. I could write a whole essay regarding my time in the Beat Saber community, but it should suffice to say that I was a mid-high level player (accuracy focused towards the end of my playtime), mediocre charter, and a regular on the discord server. While I do have some fond memories of the game and my friends associated with it, much more of that experience was negative. I sustained a seemingly permanent injury to both of my wrists (undiagnosed, but I heavily suspect Beat Saber to have mostly caused it), and frankly, the game is pretty bad in terms of rhythm gameplay. For those unaware, Beat Saber is a virtual reality game in which you wield two swords, each assigned a color. You must then slice blocks in assigned directions which approach you on a 4x3 grid (excluding the timing axis). My main problem with this concept is that momentum and ergonomics heavily limit the patterns one can perform comfortably. As such, most high-level charts settled into a few types, with players simply competing for challenging speed or accuracy on easier charts. Having said that, I owe my introduction to charting and most of my pattern reading/comprehension skills to the game.

That Game Everyone Likes

While I'm going in order of games, I should probably mention I had a brief stint playing osu!mania. I didn't much care for it.

Back to the Point

Finally I can talk about Etterna; a fork of Stepmania 5, itself a Dance Dance Revolution like game intended for keyboard play, Etterna is a highly customizable 4k-focused vertically scrolling rhythm game (VSRG) made by people who know what they're doing. It's hard to pinpoint what makes the client so wonderful to use: perhaps something to do with the frame-independent timing system I've heard mentioned, or the clear optimization of user interface. Whatever it is, Etterna is a joy to play, and its systems are the most comprehensive out of any rhythm game I've tried. The difficulty calculator even measures multiple skillsets and gives you a fairly accurate rating of how good you are at each. At the time of writing, my skill measurements are as follows:

- Jacks: 15.96

- Stream: 15.46

- Technical: 15.33

- Stamina: 14.42

- Jumpstream: 9.12

- Chordjacks: 8.18

- Handstream: 7.64

I really love the distilled improvement you feel in rhythm games. It's similar to physical fitness in many ways: players take rest days, focus on different skills in each playsession, and see immense improvement when training properly. The dopamine you get from a new personal best on a long stamina chart is indescribable. I also love charting songs, as by choosing which sounds to focus on and what patterns to assign, you are sharing your personal interpretation of the song. It's also just fun to play the result. Recently I've been getting into Solo (6 key), which allows for more expression from the step artist and higher difficulty on songs that would otherwise be boring.

I'll Stop Talking Now

Following in the footsteps of my last post, this really has been a rant. But I hope I've shared some of my enthusiasm, and if someone decides to research or try some of this stuff themself I will consider this a great success. Until next time,

gorbye!!!

- Sleeves