Aspire 2017 - Voting Now Open!

Miss the presentation livestream? Fear not, we've got all the details you need to know to make your vote count in this year's premier osu! beatmapping contest.

As part of the effort to promote more community involvement in our beatmapping contests, this year's Aspire is slated to involve popular vote as a major source of its scoring. Following on from the lessons learned from the CBC, we decided to make a feature of the 12 finalist entries for the contest, and streamed them live.

It was an absolute blast.

Over 2100 people showed up on minimal notice to watch some of the most creative beatmaps we've ever seen, and to consider the expert commentary of our incredibly talented judges - namely Okorin, pishifat, Monstrata and ztrot.

Did you miss it? Never fear, catch it all (and the live chat, too) at the VOD below:

Voting commenced with the start of the stream and will remain open for 12 days - so if you haven't voted yet, head on over to the Aspire 2017 Contest Listing, download or view the entries, and make your choices known!

Be sure to follow the instructions on the page if you decide to download the beatmaps for yourself - some of them may crash your game if you don't. Watching them via the YouTube playlist is much easier and more applicable for most voters.

We'll be looking to do more features like this in the future for other events - including Aspire-class contests for the other gamemodes, as well. Expect more of this sort of thing going forward - and with more polish to boot!

If you managed to catch the stream or watch the VOD, please let us know what you thought of it all. There's also an official discussion thread if you'd like to discuss the entries in more depth on the forums.

You can of course, discuss in the comments below if you're so inclined. Bonus points if you figure out which of the songs played during the discussion/interlude is a brand new hereunto unreleased track from one of our Featured Artists!

—Ephemeral