By mommie2zs in Love — Aug 15, 2019

And The Beat Goes On

On almost a whim, Buster borrowed $19 from Monkey and purchased this game he had read about, “Beat Saber.” This happened late in 2018.

We all played and enjoyed the game. Monkey and Buster especially found it entrancing.

But Monkey has an assortment of interests and work that she devotes time to. Buster also has varied interests, but he likes to focus with intensity on certain areas at a time.

I sat down with him to learn more about his Beat Saber progress.

1) Why did you decide to buy this game?
I had seen a video review of it that said it was very good and I’d been watching someone play it for a couple days.

2) Did you think you’d like it this much?
No. I knew it was going to be really good. I knew I wanted to be able to get to the point of beating expert levels, but I didn’t have many expectations for myself beyond that.

3) When did you realize you could actually be really good at this game?
In a personal sense, compared to everyone else we know who plays it, I felt like I had made really good progress by the time I had beaten “TTFAF” (Through The Fire And Flames). This was a custom song that I downloaded after I’d been playing the game for awhile.

I don’t think I ever really had much hope of playing competitively until after I beat “Walk This Way.” This was the first difficult “jump map” I beat. (“Mapping” a song refers to someone creating the pattern of swipes that are used to play Beat Saber.)

It laid the groundwork for all my other progress through jump maps, which are hard!

Even after beating that, I didn’t expect to get much higher than the top 500 in the world.

4) What was your ranking when you first began checking?
Around 30,000. You have to be playing ranked maps to get a ranking, which once I started playing ranked maps, I got into the top 3000 really fast. That took around a week.

When you are in the 10’s of 1000’s, a good score on a ranked map can catapult you literally thousands forward in rankings.

5) Why are we doing this blog post now? What happened?
Because after 100’s of hours of work, I reached the top 200 players in the world.

When he checked on Wednesday he was #175 in the world, #64 in the United States, and we’re pretty sure #1 in our state.

6) What’s your next goal?
There are two songs in the 20 or so hardest ranked songs I can’t beat, so I need to figure out how to beat those. One of them I am closer to than the other.

I don’t have a new ranking goal specifically.

7) Are you still enjoying playing?
Yes.

The following three videos are of Buster beating Expert+ songs that he felt showed the skill necessary to play at this high a level.