February 2025

We'd like to release something of a monthly journal talking about little things from throughout the month, and so this is the first of those.

We finally started streaming! This is something we've wanted to do regularly for a really long time, and we have the willpower and the supportive friends to try it now. Still getting a feel, but check us out <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/edencoven>on Twitch or peep the vods on Youtube. Maybe we'll go into more detail later, but we simply want to hang out and stream (mostly) retro games. It's already teaching us new things about ourselves and how we interface with the world, and we're having a lot of fun.

Games

The very first day of February marked us finishing writing up all our backloggd reviews on UFO 50, since we've cleared every single cherry and seen through the metagame. UFO 50 is definitely our top game of 2024 and just generally one of those titles that sticks in our brain and makes us obsess for weeks on end. There's too much to write about in this post, but maybe we'll find a way to look at it onstream. We like all the games in the collection, even if we don't like them equally.

We also had some opportunity to play a lot of Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O, though we've fallen off a bit. It's a fighting game that's hooked us more than just about any before, and it's a lot of fun. Surprising considering it's a 3D fighter, which we'd never expect to have gotten into. We main Aoi, the Aiki-jujitsu user. It might just be that the controls are simple enough and the combos small enough to make things feel less overwhelming. That said, we've enjoyed plenty of other fighting games recently, too. Samurai Shodown is one of them, and we intend to keep playing it on Enbyeon's monthly open lobby streams.

We got a bug in us to play Heroes of the Lance on the NES, known to be one of the worst games on the console according to luminaries like Seanbaby. It's not great, but it's weird and ambitious, and not very long. We really wanted to check it out. It's easy to get stuck just repeating a popular opinion without gaining a true understanding for yourself, and that's what we wanted to get past. There's a ton of D&D rules happening under the hood. Anyway it's still not good.

Finally, here at the end of the month, the shmup-roguelite formerly known as Monolith but now called Star of Providence got an update to go along with its console release. We were way into this eight years ago when it came out and now its got its hooks in us again. Probably more to say about it next month. A great time to check it out though.

On the streaming side, we wanted to start with a bunch of old arcade games, and we ended up expressing this via going through the entirety of Capcom Arcade Stadium, just trying each game. There were a few standouts we hadn't played before, such as Trojan. In fact, playing Trojan got us way into Spartan X/Kung Fu Master, which was the previous game of its designer and also a wildly influential game. We've got a lot of arcade titles we'd like to spend time on, and we're messing around with finding shmups that interest us. For Sunday streams, we played the PC recompilation of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (originally for N64). Going back to an old, beloved game means finding the rough edges, but Goemon really still holds up as being very fun and well paced. Our opinion hasn't changed much.

Life

It was a cold and snowy month. Heavy snow always puts us on edge, but we managed to make it through okay. Work continues. We've diversified our writing stuff, but we still want to finish up "book 1" of our stories on here and we're approaching that point. Still, it's slow. We're scatterbrained. What else is new, right? The world is a mess, but we aren't doing bad at all. Work is going well but we had some emergency car repairs that hurt our finances. We're fine, just needing a little time to recharge the bank account.

Art

Got this fantastic piece from Saucy, which we use for our end screen on streams.

Adorable and gorgeous and makes us feel all kinds of ways. Probably most plural system think about what they'd do if everyone could be separate, even if just for a day, and we suspect 'big cuddle pile' would be a common answer. Viper came up with the basic idea for the posing, with the intent being to be true to us while making sure we didn't end up being just two pairs not interacting with one another.

ChimeraCauldron finished a nice Mira sketch for us, the first piece of them that we can share with a general audience. We've talked about loving to bake before, though lately we've been making pizza dough most of all.