Project Loved: February Week 2

This week's Project Loved community voting for osu! and osu!taiko is now live! There's also a special set of Valentine's Day themed picks for osu!, including some long time community favourites, so come check it out!

Hi everyone! Welcome to the Project Loved map showcase for Week 2 of February 2018! Before we begin, I'd like to introduce the structure of voting weeks, since it seemed like last week people were concerned of our lack of acknowledgement for osu!catch.

Each mode runs on a cycle, osu! and osu!taiko are weekly, osu!mania is biweekly, and osu!catch every 3 weeks. The structure looks like so:

• Week A: osu! (10), osu!taiko (5)
• Week B: osu! (10), osu!taiko (5), osu!mania (10)
• Week C: osu! (10), osu!taiko (5), osu!catch (10)
• Week D: osu! (10), osu!taiko (5), osu!mania (10)
• Week E: osu! (10), osu!taiko (5)
• Week F: All modes

This is currently Week E of this cycle, meaning that we will be featuring maps from both osu! and osu!taiko. But don't fret, as next week we will be introducing map votes for all modes in celebration of Valentine's Day! So stay tuned!

This week, the osu! captains have compiled a list of maps that fit the Valentine's Day "love song" theme.

Navigation

• osu!
• osu!taiko

osu!

A long awaited entry into the Loved category, jesse1412's My Heart Will Go On is a long-time classic based off of an award-winning song, however poorly performed on a recorder. Somehow, he's able to capture the underlying beauty of the song while still staying true to the natural chaos of recorder screeches and general nonsense. It's worth a play if you've never seen this map.

Silynn's A Kiss for the Flower is an incredibly iconic map of an interesting and compassionate tune. With over 400 favourites, I think I can just let this one speak for itself. Be sure to play with video enabled to warm your heart this Valentine's Day.

BarkingMadDog's Koi no Hime Hime Pettanko is a highly coveted map of a highly coveted song sung by osu!'s sweetheart, namirin. This Valentine's day, celebrate the things that really matter: girls with flat chests.

As the diff name would suggest, Tarrasky's beautiful map of Furisodation (DJ HKT's bootleg MIX) will leave you drunk on love after playing it! The map features a nice storyboard, so be sure to play or watch it at least once with it enabled.

An often submitted community favorite, Alonevpk's me & u has very quickly gained a lot of popularity, shooting up to over 200 favorites and counting in the six months it's been submitted. An extremely fun map with cool mapping concepts without resorting to gimmicks, me & u is worth a play even for simply the song alone.

Silynn makes a surprising double feature this week (partially because of how relevant the songs are to the Valentine's theme) but also in that he has been a prominent graveyard mapper for years. True truly love has had its roots as an extremely challenging corner jump map since 2013 and even received a special 2016 remap after a small hiatus. Try this for a taste of what high star difficulty was like before 2014!

galvenize was for a period of time hailed as the King of DnB maps, as he consistently pumped out really high quality maps from the genre when nobody else seemed to. Much of his style still influences modern DnB maps, all of which is extremely apparent in Won't You Stay. Much of his style seems to be very plain, but it's simply because he was such an influence, that it all seems to have been done already. Jump back to 2013 with this nostalgic classic.

kiri09's map of beautiful loli thing is a timeless classic that has seen a lot of play over the years in several multi lobbies! This map is sure to test your streaming ability, and features both AR 9 and AR 10 diffs for your reading convenience. In the wise words of kiri09: "Let's hand crush".

Meg's map of Hachigatsu no Yoru has grown to be incredibly popular, boasting over 270 favourites! The map is a soothing jump map, fitting to the similarly soothing love song. To anyone who has ever wanted to play a map of the full size version of this song, this one is for you!

Possibly scraping the line of what is considered a "love song", caren_sk's Gigantic O.T.N is a powerhouse of popular 2013 mapper GD's including Aqo, Reol, HabiHolic, and more. Most difficulties come with both an AR9 and AR10 diff for those who prefer a bit more of a reading challenge, though every difficulty comes jam-packed with fun patterns giving the whole set a lot of playability.

osu!taiko

osu!taiko veteran Backfire and newcomer Y O U T A's collaboration feature consistent pattering, partially reminiscent to how older maps looked like, tough 1/3+1/6 sections and long streams, mixed into one awesome map (and song). You can truly see both mapper's trademarks, like Y O U T A's flow and Backfire's slider velocity change usage, coming into this map and it works damn well.

Everyone who has played, or watched, osu!taiko tournaments in the past years has come across this map at some point. Ryui and R i n g o's collaboration is probably one of the most known graved osu!taiko maps around, and that's not surprising: this hype song features great flow and patterns, tough finisher usage and is overall just an enjoyable experience.

This mapset, by osu!taiko veteran OnosakiHito, has seen a lot of osu!taiko's history, even going far back to being used in TWC3 as a Hidden map (which was the first osu!taiko tournament to use mod brackets!). Featuring old-style mapping, brutal streams and slider velocity and "moo", this set should be a nice throwback for old osu!taiko players!

The main draw of this one-diff set is obviously it's amazing song! An enjoyable outing from Mew104, this has slider gimmicks galore, and a lot of players should be familiar with it as the German TWC Teams warm-up in the past. Enjoy the memes!

Probably the easiest map this round, but that is not a bad thing! This great map by Lundlerol has overall nice patterns, being very accessible for players that just got into the Oni/Inner Oni-tier of difficulties. Being used a lot in tournaments and multiplayer lobbies, this seemingly unknown map has spent a lot of time in this community already and could continue this in the loved section!

From everyone on the Project Loved team, we hope you enjoy this week's selection, and look forward to the next! The winning maps will hit the beatmap listing sometime during the weekend and will be announced via the osugame twitter.

—clayton