osu! revolves around the simple concept of tap and sliding litle buttons in time with the music. It throws no complications into the mix like mines or multiple taps on the same beat. No, you are guaranteed to only have to ever tap or drag one thing at a time. The line may blur a little, though, when you get up in speed. In osu!, there are only three elements you can interact with inside a song: a circle, slider, or spinner. You tap the circle in time with the beat, drag the slider at the right time, or rapidly rotate the spinner to score. If you are off-beat or miss a note, your multiplier will start over and you'll lose health. If your health runs out, you fail the song (unless you turn on no-fail mode!)

Where osu! begins to mix things up are in the alternative modes. First you have Taiko, which plays a lot like the Taiko: Drum Master series. The other mode is Catch the Beat, which plays much like "catch the falling item" games that are everywhere. Both are an entertaining diversion, but let's face it, osu! is about the classic Ouendan gameplay!

osu!'s community is the strongest aprt of the game, and the community-enhancing aspects are what make it shine over its peers. First of all, whenever you download beatmaps, you create a profile that carries over to the game itself. This profile keeps track of things such as your current global rank, your level (based on total accumulated score), the total amount of hits and what kind of hits they were, and other such metrics information. It's very interesting, although not entirely necessary. Integrated into the game itself is a robust IRC chat client that allows you to chat with other players seamlessly. There are several built-in online multiplayer modes beyond the indirect competition of scores.

The core of the osu! community is the custom beatmaps. Any player can toss an mp3 into osu! and edit a beatmap to it. The editor is incredibly robust, having much more features than comparable analogues for Frets on Fire or Stepmania. Once a beatmap has been finished, the creator can submit it to be ranked, where moderators will review it and either determine that it needs more work or if it is ready to move on to ranking. Any beatmap that has been officially ranked (and there are plenty of those) has leaderboards for all three modes of play.

osu! is a simple game that knows exactly what it wants to be about. This is a game all about the community, and it oozes from every pore. Such incredible devotion to bringing fellow players together is admirable, and as is, osu! rivals many retail products. You can download osu! as well as new beatmaps from the official site. Sorry Linux and Mac users, you'll need to emulate Windows if you plan on playing osu!

For another look at freeware games, take a peek at Joystiq's Free Game Club weekly feature!