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.

NJFox has been hard at work on his Krystal-focused games for a while now using off-the-shelf game engines and teaching himself game development from scratch. He truly took to heart the idea of making the games he wanted to see.

His previous work on the demo for Star Fox Adventures 2 has been available for a while. He released a new trailer for it a few weeks back.

Learning from that experience, he's been frantically completing his first demo for Star Fox Adventures Zero: Krystal's Story. This new demo offers the following new features over his previous demos:

• Full controller support
• Better graphics
• Open environments for exploration
• More models
• Up to 4 items swapable with the R-stick
• Swapping between Tricky and Kyte
• Mini-map
• Remade locations based on official in-game models from Star Fox Adventures
• Multiple enemy types
• Usable SharpClaw Cannon
• Gold bars can be dug up in Cape Claw and exchanged for expensive items
• A day-and-night cycle, allowing for sneaking up on SharpClaw when they sleep at night, and other time-sensitive events

Because this is only a demo, there are still some major limitations:

• Some of the areas are restricted from deep exploration
• No dungeons yet
• Number of items and spells are limited
• Scarab count (currency) is limited to 10 for now

NJFox's future plans for different locations include:

• Explorable dungeon with the Red Eye King boss chamber
• Underground laboratory for Dragon Rock's Great Tower
• Extended treasure rooms and mines in CloudRunner Fortress

You can download and play the game now. It's a single executable made with the Unity game engine.

Download from Google Drive

With the release of this demo, NJFox will be taking a break from these Krystal game projects to work on other, bigger projects using the experiences he's gained here. He doesn't know when he'll come back to this, but he plans to come back to it eventually.

Fearch 93 shows off his custom Krystal characters using the character creation tools of Soul Calibur 6. There's both an Adventures Tribal outfit and an Assault Jumpsuit outfit in here. Both are staff users.

For the second GameplayReviewUK community challenge, the participants were challenged to recreate the Arwing from Star Fox. Only one entry was entered, by Commie_Killer76, but he did a fantastic job. As you can see in the video, the ship is capable of VTOL, can shoot missiles, and has multiple configurations for its engines and wings. Very cool.

As you can see from this video by RenaKunisaki, work on the Krystal mod of Star Fox Adventures continues very quickly. As of now, I believe Krystal is playable in all areas of the game, with some minor hiccups. This is actually using Krystal's game object, not replacing Fox's model with Krystal's. As a result, Krystal keeps her sound effects where they exist. As of now, there are still some visual glitches, such as Krystal being too tall for some areas due to the slight difference in height between her and Fox, as well as lack of animations for parts of her and some things she was never intended to do. We'll see how much those can be improved in the future. Replacement of voice samples and sound effects might be relatively straight-forward.

You can find the full Gecko code to do this yourself (with your legitimately ripped, personal copy of Star Fox Adventures!) in the video description. Additional codes, information, and tools can be found at the Github project page. In case you were wondering, the audio desync issues are related to the video editing process, not because of the mod.

Research and continued work are discussed on the Krystal Archive Discord. For instance, they've figured out how to spawn almost any object they want. Check out this picture by Nightcast!

As rumored for a long time, Nintendo has recently added Star Fox 2 to Nintendo Online, free to download if you've paid for the service. This is the second release of the legendary game after the SNES Mini. I guess this means that Star Fox 2 is now in the category of regular releases for Nintendo, which means that there are only two Star Fox games that have never been re-released or made available digitally: Star Fox Adventures and Star Fox Assault. Hope that changes soon!

Just to confirm in case you're wondering, the Krystal Archive will be taking a break for Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, to resume posting on Monday. Take this time to be with your family and friends, think about what you're thankful for, and enjoy the blessings you have. I'll see you all on Monday.

Oh, actually one thing: I've been hearing that Best Buy (and maybe other retailers) plan to offload their Starlink Switch starter packs with the Arwing and Fox McCloud for $10 each. I went by my local Best Buy today and found that, although they are all still listed for $60, they had several dozen on the shelf, and they looked like a recent shipment. So, if you haven't picked up the game yet, or if you wanted to make your own Godwing, see what your local Best Buy has to offer. Thanks to memer55 for the heads up and photo.