I'm quite a fan of Elite Beat Agents , so I was excited to see a fan game online that features thousands of user-created levels (referred to as "Beatmaps").

If you aren't familiar with the game, here is Nintendolife's review of the Western DS release.

You download the program onto your computer, and then the separate beatmaps . Some have video, some have animated cutscenes like in the game, and some have neither. You can then play through the beatmaps in either the regular style (tapping circles on screen with your mouse, a graphics tablet or fancy (and expensive) Tablet PCs, or you can play a Donkey Konga style game with most of the beatmaps - where you simply have to tap your mouse in time like in Guitar Hero.

The community is very geared towards Hi-scores and sharing creations (and giving feedback on created levels - whether they are too easy/difficult or out of sync), which can be quite fun, and if you are a creative type, there's a lot of scope for creating an authentic looking level. Alternatively, If you like tapping circles to obscure animé music, you might get a kick out of it.

However, there are a few problems. Mouse control is difficult on some of the beatmaps - you have to manoeuvre the mouse around the screen at a precise and swift manner - more so on the harder difficulty levels, and the spinners that some DS owners loath are even more hellish when you try doing it with a mouse cursor. In all, mouse control is a bit tricky, but that would depend on the quality of your mouse. All I can say is that I'm not ready to give up on the retail DS versions quite yet.
Secondly, the beatmaps take up varying file sizes including as little as 1.8mb as as much as 25mb - depending on whether the beatmap includes an AVI video that plays in the background or not. My beatmap folder alone takes up 1.8 GB of hard drive space. (495 songs - a lot of them unreasonably difficult - and then some)

Is anyone interested in forming a community on this forum, where we can share scores and links to each other's beatmaps [EDIT] and organise online play [EDIT]? I haven't finished my own quite yet, but I'm getting there.

The website is http://osu.ppy.sh - It'll probably explain more than I have.

I can't go on the link

Sorry. I was playing about with hyperlinks for the first time. It should be OK now.

I posted this before. Anyway, I really like this game, I have been playing it since around February. Still play every now and then. You wanna play online sometime?

Definitely. I haven't actually played along with anyone yet.

I'm gonna give this a try. Looks fairly good.

I tried downloading a beatmap, I got a file called something like 628 with no extension and was 0 bytes large. Help?

Did you download it as a zip/winrar file or a .osz file? And was it from the tutorial section?

I suggest (internet connection speed permitting) you download the files in packs (http://osu.ppy.sh/p/packlist). They are from a file sharing site (filefront I think), although they come in groups of 10, so they files themselves are pretty big.

@edhe: I just clicked on the button that said download beatmap, it said it should be .osz.
P.S. Won't be posting again for another 3 hours.

Well, I hope I've helped. Personally, I haven't experienced such a problem.

I downloaded a pack (took a bloody long time though) and the songs all work. I still don't know why I can't download the individual songs, though...

Does anyone wanna play online? If so, what beatmap?

I'll have a go, but I haven't done a multiplayer one yet (ad wouldn't know how). also I'm pretty bad at it.

PS - people in this thread should try organising matches through Nintendolife Chat, I myself am not quite sure how to go about organising a multiplayer, but it seems pretty straightforward.

Just go to Multiplayer, create a game, chose a beatmap and wait for people to join.

Sounds easy enough. Also it might be useful if we state the user names we use on OSU! I myself use the name Edhe.

Mine is fudgenuts64. When do you wanna play?

asap. i've been trying to contact you on nintendolife chat. Like I said, by first going through Nintendo life chat we can discuss which song to play and the password. I don't have much time. I'm on chat now.

I got it working, and I suck at it, but it's loads of fun!

Don't worry about that. It takes getting used to. By the way, were you able to download seperate beatmaps in the end?

Yeah, turns out Download Accelerator Plus was screwing things up. I turned it off, works fine now.