It's my birthday!

The Krystal Archive has been online for 14 whole years! Yep. 14. Kind of an awkward year to celebrate. Not a cool unlucky number like 13 or a big round number like 15. Oh well, there's always next year.

In 2019, a lot of posts and Krystal stuff happened. WAY too much to cover here. I plan to record a year-in-review podcast episode tonight and hopefully release it too. It's been a while since I did one of these, so it will be a bit rough.

One thing I've been exploring is converting the site from Wordpress to a statically built site. It should make the site much faster and provide opportunities to make things more efficient. Plus, it'll make it quicker to make big project changes like the fanart section. There are some questions to solve about comments and such, however.

Hey! It's 2020! Happy New Year!

2019 was a fantastic year for the site! I want to keep that going. I owe you guys a podcast (which is now basically a yearly podcast), so that's coming soon. Other than that, I'm doing my best to bring you new stories every day. I have some plans for the site as well that will hopefully reintegrate all the old content with the new and modernize all the things!

Anyway, have a great New Year and stay safe out there. I have more to talk about soon.

It's another MMD by ShattenKitsune666! This one is still a work in progress. She posted it unlisted, but gave me permission to post it. The song is Diamond Sky by Elliot Berger.

Here's something you don't see every day. Moonllita, a Krystal cosplayer from earlier this year, has created a tutorial showing how she created her costume. She goes through the research, design, and creation of the armor, staff, jewelry, bodysuit, ears, and tail.

This was posted back in October, but I had missed it! I only noticed because of Ayano's repost.

Looks like Arlo took advantage of the ongoing sales of Starlink by purchasing at least 19 copies of the Nintendo Switch Star Fox starter pack. He made a video about it, which is about the extent of his ideas for what in the world to do with 19 copies of Starlink. He bought these for $10 each. If you want to get in on the deal, the game has been further reduced to an insane $6 each at Best Buy.

Kinda hilarious, kinda creepy. Shiponda created a quick ASMR video featuring Krystal making weird ASMR noises and whispering "This ASMR is especially for you..." in what appears to be Russian. Then she lights a cigarette. This is using a relatively uncommon Krystal model originally made for the unreleased Star Fox: Paths of Fate mod, which is a whole other post I need to make. The steam version of the model is here.

Normally, I wouldn't post this sort of thing, but it seems to be a completely harmless joke. Also, Nintendo did it first.

As the year winds down, it's time to celebrate the holiday of giving and spending time with family. I hope your Christmas celebrations are safe, fun, and wholesome. Thank you all for a wonderful year and a lot of interesting developments. I will continue posting through the New Year, no plans to stop right now. May the Krystmas spirit be in all of you!

Artwork by AvaikaofStarfox, used with permission.

YouTube user Shesez created a video a while back showcasing lots of little hidden nuggets of information that you can only really see if you can freely move the camera around in Star Fox 64. It's amazing how much the game developers got away with not showing due to the limited rendering hardware at the time. If they could avoid drawing a polygon, they almost always avoided it! Other than that, we get to see some overlooked details, like Slippy's eye shape and a hidden secret when James McCloud appears.

During the Nintendo Indie World presentation a few days ago, Devolver Digital revealed that "Talos Principle: Deluxe Edition" was coming to the Nintendo Switch. In fact, it was made available that same day!

This is interesting, as it might represent the first Krystal easter egg on the Nintendo Switch. Back in June, we posted about a Krystal easter egg in the game's secret dev room, where many of the game's developers got to put a small avatar image and a quote. Anton Marinov notably added a Krystal-related quote and some Krystal fanart. Check out the original post for full details.

I don't know yet if these references were retained in the Deluxe Edition for the Nintendo Switch, I don't have the game myself. If you have the Switch version, please play through the game and find out if the game's dev room still exists and if the Krystal message is any different in the Switch version.

Looks like good old Hugo Peters is back in the Dinosaur Planet exploration game. According to this recent video, he's found out how to load arbitrary maps from the kiosk version of Star Fox Adventures, the version playable at E3 and on those in-store kiosks that game companies use to preview upcoming titles. That version was known to have lots of leftovers from Dinosaur Planet, as well as unused assets from the in-progress version of Star Fox Adventures. Always good to see more exploration of this gaming artifact.

In the video you can see a test map used to test different animations and environmental interactions. There are also some old assets, including what looks like a platform intended to move along a suspended rope system. After that, he shows an alternate version of part of the Ocean Force Point Temple.