So the people making the next Star Wars movie, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, posted a short video about how they made the "crystal fox" animal character, known as a vulptex. Now, this is not the Krystal fox we know and love, but you know what, I'll take the Google spell-checker redirects to the Krystal Archive. "Sorry did you mean to search for Krystal fox?"

But seriously, the animatronics and CGI look pretty sweet. And yeah, this is VERY tangentially related to Krystal or Star Fox, but it's Thanksgiving, and I wanted to post something today!

Anyway, thank you all for coming to the site and reading what I have to say. I hope you and your family get to spend time together and think about all the ways in which you are thankful.

CommanderD has created a custom skin mod to put the Star Fox Adventures Krystal into a pixel-based action RPG game with heavy Japanese lore influences. The Krystal skin comes complete with her Staff as a weapon. This mod was designed in the Playstation 4 version of Cladun Returns: This is Sengoku!, but it should also work in the much cheaper Cladun X2 (both available on Steam).

Original posts: Tweet 1, Tweet 2, Tweet 3, Tweet 4, Tweet 5

To recreate this skin yourself, refer to the image gallery below. It shows how the various parts are constructed, pixel by pixel. Thanks very much for CommanderD making this available to us all.

This is just one video in a series where Alpharad trains an Amiibo in Smash 4 from nothing to level 50. Fox is actually pretty low in the tier list, but somehow, this Fox Amiibo is just too strong, too fast, too smart. He gives Alpharad some serious trouble very early on, and it only gets worse as Fox approaches level 50. Check it out for a laugh or two.

The new iPhone X features a sensor called the TrueDepth Camera. It can sense the shape and distance of objects nearby, even in pitch black. Though initially built for detecting your face for security reasons, some enterprising developers have used it to create a game. Rigel Benton, Kenny Bier, Kaci Lambeth, and Jeff Arthur worked together at the VR Austin Jam 2017 to create a Star Fox themed game over the course of a couple days.

In the game, your move your face and change your expression to control the on-screen Andross face, locked in battle with an Arwing. You aim by turning your head. Open your mouth to fire polygon blocks at the Arwing, and closing your eyes makes the Arwing's laser fire pass through you without damaging you. Both you (Andross) and the Arwing have a health bar, so whoever's shield gets depleted first is the loser.

Check out the Project Site for screens and a download of the code for the game. With a little programming skill and an iPhone X, you could run their game on your own hardware.

Here's the Japanese version of the Star Fox Assault Fichina Briefing scene. As usual, the characters are more expressive, especially Fox. Here, he has a genuine look of surprise at one point, and in another, a silent laugh. Both are completely absent from the English version.

Now, let's combine the Japanese animation with the English voice acting and text. This time the lipsyncing mostly ok.

I also noticed that in the English version, Falco speaks some of ROB's lines.

This week's Star Fox Assault cutscene is the Fichina Briefing scene. Tracking Pigma, team Star Fox arrive at Fichina to find climate control generator completely non-functional and a massive blizzard beginning to grow out of control. Fox McCloud plans to head to the surface to reactivate the generator so their Arwings can fly normally. Krystal thinks IT'S A TRAP!

As with all of these, we have beautiful 4K (5K) visuals and improved audio The Japanese and mixed versions are coming tomorrow.

Sorry I missed last week. I didn't have time to do the conversion then.

A couple weeks ago, SchattenKitsune666 made is Adventures Krystal MMD Rig available. Revisiting it recently, he realized that there were a lot of errors and issues. So he removed the old version and made a new, updated version available. Like the old version, this rig is based off the ripped Krystal Star Fox Adventures mesh from Models Resource. The download includes a tutorial for getting the fur rendering to work correctly.

New Features:

• Head gems physically modeled instead of using textures
• Improved facial rigging and weighting on the ears
• Alternate version with Krystal's tail unbanded

Download via DeviantArt

As mentioned previously, there's a bunch of new model rips coming out for various Star Fox games. Since the last post, there have been a LOT of dinosaur species and characters ripped from Star Fox Adventures, including CloudRunners, EarthWalkers, and various specific individuals like Gradabug. However, I think the most interesting rips to us Krystal fans are these three:

• Krystal's Floating Head - Model used when she gave Fox instructions to use her Staff and during the final cutscene via a hologram
• Krystal's Staff - Fully extended and opened.
• Krystal's Collapsed Staff - Collapsed into its smaller size, used when Fox puts it away into his backpack.

Isn't it interesting how they didn't just reuse Krystal's existing model, but make a new one when they just needed her head. Also, the collapsed Staff is almost identical in design to the extended one, except that the shaft is removed. I always assumed there would have been some of the brown-ish part still there when it was collapsed, but apparently, Krystal's Staff gets EXTREMELY small when Fox puts it away.

All three models were ripped by Models124717, who has done most of the model ripping for Star Fox Adventures and Assault.

AbbyStabby (Abby Davis) has completed both the Prologue and Chapter One of her Star Fox Adventures comic. So far, it's revealed a bit more about how Krystal came to be on Sauria and what she was doing up until the time Fox McCloud arrived. Chapter Two begins with Krystal and her CloudRunner ride crash landing at Krazoa Palace. I imagine this chapter will be very interesting to us Krystal fans!

As I mentioned before, Abby is looking for patrons to fund the comic. You can donate a certain amount each month via Patreon to get early access and other goodies. Check out her Patreon page.

SchattenKitsune666 has released a new Krystal MMD rig for public download. The rig was used in this Renamon and Krystal music video, and a similar rig was used for Falemirous' Half Life 2 Mod. The original rig by Warfaremachine is mature and can't be linked here, but this one was modified by SchattenKitsune666 to both remove the mature aspects and make it compatible with MikuMikuDance.

Once again, great work by SchattenKitsune666 in bringing so many different variations of Krystal to MMD!