Man, I needed this. I was neck-deep in some truly garbage database migration project this week. My brain was toast, absolutely fried from looking at poorly indexed tables and stored procedures that nobody had touched since 2015. You know that feeling? When you just need to ditch the current decade and jump back to a simpler time?
For me, that simple time was 2018. Specifically, the hype leading up to the osu! World Cup. Everyone was glued to their screens, debating maps, talking setups. I wasn’t just going to watch old VODs though. That’s passive crap. I wanted to feel the strain on my wrists again. I decided I was going to recreate the warm-up environment exactly as I remembered it.
The Scavenger Hunt: Finding the Setlist
The first step, the real hurdle, was locking down the actual warm-up pool. You can find the main map pool easily enough—it’s documented everywhere. But the warm-up? That stuff vanishes. It’s ephemeral. I had to scour some dusty corners of the internet, digging through old forum threads and Discord logs that looked like they were abandoned when Windows 7 was still cool.
What made it complicated was that there wasn’t one single “warm-up.” There were the official tournament warm-ups, and then there were the community-driven pre-tournament practice pools that everyone was grinding. I focused on the latter, because those were the ones everyone actually played until their fingers bled. I spent a whole afternoon cross-referencing three different community lists until I was confident I had the top 15 most brutal warm-up maps from that specific period.
This wasn’t just downloading beatmaps. This was archaeological work. Some of the map download links were dead. I had to track down archives, often finding them bundled inside giant, poorly organized zip files hosted on services I hadn’t used in five years. I finally managed to compile a solid list of the specific map versions, ensuring the difficulty ratings and timing offsets matched what the pros were using then.
Stripping Down the Setup for Authenticity
You can’t relive 2018 hype on a modern rig running 360Hz monitors and zero latency internet. That’s cheating. Part of the whole 2018 feel was the slight jank, the input lag everyone had to fight through, the slightly older client version. So, I took steps to make the experience genuinely authentic, or at least, authentically frustrating.
- The Client: I didn’t roll back the whole osu! client—that’s just asking for trouble with modern OS compatibility—but I deliberately switched my settings to emulate the visual experience of the older client. I dialed down the frame limiter and used a skin that was period-correct, something heavy on skeuomorphism and light on modern clarity.
- The Display: This was key. I dug my old secondary monitor out of the basement. It’s a crusty 144Hz panel that honestly struggles to maintain refresh rate. I forced the game onto that display and capped the FPS at 288, which was a common target back when 144Hz was standard. The resulting screen tearing and slightly sluggish input? Perfect. It immediately threw me back to fighting my hardware just as much as fighting the map.
- Input Lag Emulation: I added a slight, artificial delay (around 8ms) in my tablet settings. I know, blasphemy. But in 2018, few people had optimized their setups like they do now. That tiny bit of unexpected lag throws off your muscle memory and forces you to rely purely on rhythm and prediction, which is exactly what made those warm-up maps so challenging then.
The Grind: Smashed Keys and Sore Fingers
Once the environment was set, I loaded up the warm-up pool. The maps themselves were a punch to the gut. The 2018 meta was heavily focused on complex stream patterns and high-BPM jump bursts—less complicated timing than today’s maps, but far more emphasis on raw physical speed and stamina.
I started with the obligatory speed map, the one everyone used to test if their stamina was there. My hands were freezing up after the first minute. It wasn’t just the map difficulty; it was fighting the simulated input delay and the slightly choppy framerate on that old monitor. I remember thinking: “Did I really play this much better six years ago, or was I just younger and dumber?”
I recorded my accuracy on the first five attempts for each of the fifteen maps. My average accuracy was a dismal 96.2%, which sounds good, but on these maps, that meant missing key stream sections and getting massive combo breaks. It showed how much my current playing style—optimized for modern rhythm games and less focused on raw speed endurance—didn’t translate immediately back to the 2018 style.
I spent three hours just hammering through the pool, pushing my stamina until my wrist started clicking in ways it shouldn’t. By the end, I had finally broken 98% accuracy on about half the maps. My best scores were still nowhere near what the pros were hitting in the actual 2018 warm-up, but that wasn’t the point.
The realization I walked away with? That specific kind of intense, raw competitive energy—the feeling of just trying to hold on against overwhelming speed—is completely absent in my current projects. It was a perfect, exhausting reset button for my burnt-out brain. The migration project is still garbage, but at least now I remember what it feels like to struggle against something genuinely difficult and win a small victory.