Hey everyone. I'm sorry I haven't been around much. The reason is pretty simple: Real life stuff, been busy.

To be specific, I'm basically a boss now. I'm now running a project that I have been a part of for like 4 years. Started out as a small part, now running the thing! I even have employees under me, expecting me to know what in the world I'm doing! I never asked for this.

That is what's been taking my time and energy. Well that, and a few other things, most of them also in real life. Seriously, I've had very little online life for a few months. Nevertheless, I don't want to stop posting to the Krystal Archive, nor has my appreciation for Krystal waned. I will try harder to provide new content and keep our celebration of Krystal strong!

Kirby doing his taxes by JJAnimations.

In this latest trailer from UndyingNephalim, we see the Corneria City level from Star Fox Event Horizon, now with full voice acting for all the characters. This includes, Fox, Falco, Slippy, Peppy, Fara Phoenix, General Pepper, ...Colonel Shears..., as well as various Cornerian and Venomian commanders. Slippy's new voice caught me by complete surprise!

Looks like the YouTube embed is disabled, so you can watch it on YouTube.

Well this is interesting. Some people noticed that Reynolds Logistics, a fuel and chemical transport company in Europe, has a logo that looks like it is inspired by Krystal's hip tattoo. Or was it copied?

The question arises: which one came first? That logo for the company, or Krystal's tattoo? Reynolds Logistics was founded in 1928, but their website didn't exist until September 2004, two years after the release of Star Fox Adventures. The earliest confirmed reference I can find to Reynolds Logistics using that logo was in February 2011. No luck in my search beyond that.

Of course, both Krystal's tattoo and their logo could both have been inspired by a third, older reference. The closest thing I could find in a brief search was the "spiral sun" or "tribal sun" symbol, but that one seems to always have more than 4 points coming off of it.

I guess the only thing we could do is to contact Reynolds Logistics about it. So I have! I'll let you know if I find out anything.

Thanks to TechnicolorCosplay for informing me of this. Additional photos from Bulk Distributer and UK FCA.

Jock Blaney portrayed the voice of Wolf O'Donnell, Bill Grey, and the Granga Pilot in Star Fox 64. Much like Estelle Ellis, Jock has agreed to return to his voice roles in Star Fox: Event Horizon by UndyingNephalim. Check out the trailer above for some clips, as well as Wolf and Krystal bickering over comms.

Tabletop figurine and miniature company, AwooPrints, is planning to create figurines of Krystal for eventual sale. They are asking for preferences for the pose they'll go with. I voted for pose number 1 myself. Please go to their post on Twitter and vote for your favorite! Hopefully, within a few weeks or months, we'll get to see the finished product and purchase a copy for ourselves. Just to give a ballpark, a lot of their similar painted figurines go for about $100 and are about 5 inches tall.

It's that time of year again, gamer bros and sisters! Nintendo will be presenting a Nintendo Direct tomorrow February 8th at 2PM Pacific (5PM Eastern). It will cover a bunch of games planned for release in the first half of 2023. I expect we will see a lot about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and a few other large announcements. I don't expect anything Star Fox related, not even any current rumors about that.

There's a rumor going around related to talk of Nintendo skipping E3 this year. They say Nintendo doesn't have many games to announce in the latter half of 2023. Even if this is true, I don't personally think it's because they lack games to release, but rather that they may be holding back releases to polish them up and have them available for whatever the successor of the Nintendo Switch will be. The Switch has been a phenomenal success, but as sales start to slow down after 6 years of winning, I expect they'll have a new console ready for release within a year or so. If they keep the same pace of game releases as they did on the Nintendo Switch, they'll have another hit on their hands no problem! All that said, I doubt they'll talk about a Switch successor until at least after Tears of the Kingdom has been out for a few months.

A video by DidYouKnowGaming made the rounds yesterday. Back in 2013, Eric Kozlowsky, an employee inside Retro Studios, pitched a game idea for "Star Fox Armada", a mission-based Star Fox with a more open world and a heavy emphasis on multiplayer and online interactions. If it had been successful, it would have featured some ideas that ultimately would see an appearance inside games like Starlink and Star Fox Zero. It would have also utilized a graphical style designed to evoke the puppet aesthetic from the SNES game's marketing.

The document presented internally was a skeleton, only pointing out interesting ideas, but lacking a lot of details, as is common for pitch documents. Retro Studio executives found the idea interesting, but ultimately did not do anything with it. According to Eric, what Retro Studios ultimately decides to work on is largely decided externally by Nintendo of Japan. Many other internal pitches were similarly ignored.

Had the pitch gone forward, it would have almost certainly rebooted the series to a point just after the events of Star Fox 64, getting rid of Adventures, Assault, and Command in the continuity (more than half of the series' lore). I think we can all be a little bit glad that this particular pitch was passed over as it would have meant removing a lot of canon, including our beloved Krystal.

It's interesting that he wanted to call it Star Fox Armada. I believe that was the placeholder name for the arcade version of Star Fox under development at the same time as Star Fox Assault for the then-new "Triforce" arcade board. Nothing ever came of this game, however.

DidYouKnowGaming also mentioned that they would be publishing a video about the long-rumored "Star Fox Grand Prix" soon. Last I heard, the racing-based Star Fox game was rumored to have been a trap to figure out what employees were leaking Nintendo secrets, and was never a real game project at all. I guess we'll find out soon.

The Krystal Archive has been online since January 8th, 2006! 17 years will give you such a crick in the neck!

The thing I want to say most is that my real life has remained somewhat busier than I had hoped, which lead to some periods in 2022 where multiple weeks, even whole months, passed by with no updates to the site. And while it would be easy to say that I've been too busy with real life, in reality it's something else. I have a tremendous amount of things to post about. Hundreds of posts worth of content. Each one can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to write and post. Facing that daunting amount of stuff, I tell myself that "I'll do that when I can dedicate a large amount of time to sit down and focus exclusively on the site," which you can imagine rarely happens.

No, better habits are the key. I need to be willing to do one or two little things in the time I have, rather than focusing on the whole pile. If I can get to one post a day, I think that would be good. I'd ask for help, but managing people right now would probably be more work than simply doing it myself right now, at least until I can get a better system in place.

So what's next? I think recording a new podcast episode is in order. We haven't had an episode since January of 2020. Once again, it's a task that takes several hours by itself. But I will work hard to make that happen in the coming days!

Super happy to announce that Krystal has been modded into DNF Duel, a popular, but relatively new fighting game. Estelle Ellis provides her Krystal voice to this mod like several other projects in the recent past.

The mod replaces the Launcher character with a Krystal model by Kayla Fox. The Launcher character summons in high tech weapons to use in battle, and appears to be a more long-range focused fighter class. The character art is by Powree (aka Froggiechan). This mod also adds in Krazoa Palace OC ReMix by Tremendouz for the stage music.

You can download the mod on GameBanana right now, for free! (And while you're there, why not download the mod for her furry rival, Renamon, as your player 2?

Click the thumbnail below for the full resolution character art by Powree! Powree has been making Krystal art for a long time, including this recent one.

This mod was created by Rhyfe2002. He put in a lot of work and got some additional help from Jon-Nobo (and also me, lol). Thanks to everyone involved for making this possible!

UndyingNephalim has been putting out a lot more Star Fox content lately. I've got some catchup to do. In the meantime, here's the latest from him. It's a 17 minute playthrough of the Area 6 level of Star Fox Event Horizon, one of two levels preceding the attack on Venom. It's a relatively straightforward level of two large-scale fleets of starships battling it out over the planet.