vankusss, or van for short, is an active, Slovakian, Dronie-winning highscorer/speedrunner and a former grandmaster of N. He is known for his impressive skill and cleanliness, as well as his innovative capacity and determination. He also known to primarily focus on 0th scores, which explains his relatively modest count of top-20 scores and his similarly low Total Level Score. However, of the levels he has highscored, his average rank on each level is an impessive 3rd. As of 6 March 2015, vankusss (combined with his van_come_to_irc account) is ranked 4th in the Metanet 0th Rankings with 10 0ths, and 9th in to top-20 Rankings, with 421 Scores altogether; although by his own admission, he doesn't actually care about the latter stat. He has 9 Level 0ths and 1 Episode 0th.
vankusss is also known for executing difficult innovations, which he and other members such as TRO, Raif, etc. prepare, which usually garners him impressive leads over 1st. Van also held the 6 biggest differences between 0th and 1st at one point.
He is known as van on IRC. He was also the co-host of season 4 of the highscoring tournament, Blur with ska. He made a special comeback to compete in Blur 5.
Mapping[]
vankusss joined and created his first map for Numa on 1st December, 2008. Since then, he has notched up a total of 4 maps; his second one coming over five months later in April 2009. He abandoned the simple challenge feel of his first two maps with his third map, exploded pillow. This map was very well received; it garnered praise from several prominent community members, including Yahoozy and RadiumFalcon, and was eventually featured by Seneschal. His fourth and most recent map was a map for Leaff's animals trend.
Highscoring and Speedrunning[]
Although a member since December 2008, van was mostly inactive until February the next year, when he discovered the #n-highscores channel on IRC. This led to his emergence as one of NUMA's most regular and adept highscorers/speedrunners, and the solidification of his reputation as a play-tester.
Soon afterwards, van started highscoring and speedrunning Metanet and NReality maps with great success. He quickly attained a top 10 position in the speedrun 0th table with over 20 0ths and over 100 top-20s.
Van took his first Metanet highscore 0th on level 37-2 on 20 August, 2009. By January 2011, he had rapidly acquired over 168 0ths to topple the 0th leader, xaelar, who had been the grandmaster for over 3 years. (However, xaelar temporarily reclaimed top spot on 4 April, 2011, after ska took van's 56-4 0th.) Van secured as many as 173 0ths (Ranked 0th) by January 2011. (These were all taken within 18 months of his first Metanet 0th).
vankusss is one of the few highscorers who spends a similar amount of time highscoring/speedrunning both NUMA and Metanet/NReality maps. He still frequents the #n-highscores channel on a regular basis.
He was also one of the few highscorers to own all 6 0ths for an episode (Ep 48, Ep 64 and some more) known as an episode ownage. However he lost all his ownages to xaelar and Eddy.
In September 2010, van broke a 3-way tie to obtain the largest difference between 0th and 1st on 49-2 with a 3.375 second difference at the time which he obtained by pulling off an elaborate innovation. The 0th was soon taken by ska by a frame which he held before a faster route was found by macrohenry more than 2 years later.
Van was awarded with the Dronie for Player of the Year 2010 for a string of great highscore runs.
In late December 2010, van again held the record for the largest difference between 0th and 1st with a 4.025 second lead over xaelar with an innovation concocted between TheRealOne and himself on 61-2, which has since been taken by Eddy.
The lead remained the largest difference between 0th and 1st until 13 January 2011 when vankusss pulled off the incredible innovation on 46-4 which had long been thought to be 'humanly impractical', consisting of getting the 3 missed pieces of gold. This was due to the immense precision, practice and patience required and the fact that the innovation in its entirety had only been achieved by Mohamedraif months earlier in the form of a Manually Built Demo. Because of this amazing feat, the difference between 0th and 1st was 4.875; the largest difference since lookatthis' run on 84-0 on 24 June 2008, which had garnered a 8.775 second lead over 1st until the next day when Analu reduced the lead to 5.175. By January 13th 2011, ToeFaceKiller severely reduced van's lead on 46-4 causing the greatest difference to fall back to van's 61-2 0th of 3.5 seconds. As of 11 December 2011, the largest difference between 0th and 1st on any level is by van by a margin of 2.9 on 59-2 utilising a very stylish reverse corner jump to save a lot of time.
vankusss also won the N 2.0 Holiday Challenge/Contesque by taking 0th on all 3 boards, despite tough competition from players such as EddyMataGallos, Zapmeister999 & loudog.
He was also the only person to pass 1000 time on the hard challenge & then joined loudog who also reached 1000 on the hardest challenge, he also said, "Although the challenging part for me was beating 1000 on all modes (which i failed on harder, but it’s possible)".
Vankusss has stated that it took him over 400 thousand deaths to beat N.
Departures and Comebacks[]
On January 31, 2010, vankusss announced that he was leaving the N community for five months due to his addiction to highscoring.[1] He returned prematurely and overtook Mr_Lim in the 0ths rankings, with xaelar being the only player with more 0ths at the time. On the 5th of July, 2010, van took his 100th 0th on 74-4 to become only the sixth player ever to achieve this amazing feat until inevitably overtaking xaelar at the start of 2011. The two used to be constantly at war for overall 0th position until the activity of the two decreased.
Owing to his recent inactivity, he recently lost 0th spot to xaelar and soon after, to Eddy. He's now 2nd behind Eddy and xaelar.
External links[]
- Vankusss on NUMA