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.

Kevin Bayliss, Graphics Director and voice of Tricky in Star Fox Adventures, decided to play Star Fox Adventures on stream as part of the celebration for the 20th Anniversary. He enjoyed himself so much that he's going to stream again today, this time with an actual memory card! He will probably give tidbits about development and show off concept art.

You can watch the original stream and today, watch the newest one on Twitch. Today's stream is at 8PM UK time (3PM Eastern, 12PM Pacific), a little over an hour from now!

According to his stream schedule, it looks like he'll be doing a lot more Star Fox Adventures streaming in the future too!

When I suggested things people could do to celebrate Star Fox Adventure's 20th Anniversary, I half-jokingly suggested doing your impression of Shabunga (the Shop Keeper). Jacob, who previously submitted his Fox McCloud cosplay took this as a challenge and really delivered!

Multiple costumed characters, voice acting impressions, multiple scenes, music, unique items. It's both a love story to, and a parody of, the shopping experience in Star Fox Adventures. Well done, Jacob! Very clever.

This one flew a little under the radar. Aarza, with the help of Maygik, have put together a brand new Krystal rig for Gmod based on her Star Fox Adventures model. It features rag-dolling, hostile and friendly NPC modes, and even eye posing. The only drawbacks are a little bit of loincloth clipping and a lack of face posing.

You can download the rig from Steam Workshop and use it today!

A slightly late post in our #StarFoxAdventures20th Anniversary series.

Just a quick update.

We had our celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Star Fox Adventures on the 23rd, and I am just blown away at all the different things people have done. Estelle Ellis, in particular, seems to be lending her voice to a ton of Krystal projects. Far more than I expected.

I have a complete list of stuff to post, and I promise I will get to them. I'm just sorry I couldn't post everything by the 23rd. Work and travel prevented me. But I have at least 9 more #StarFoxAdventures20th posts to do, plus other Krystal and Star Fox related things all from the last two weeks. Please be patient.

Lastly, I got a concerning email from someone about people being emailed something about bitcoin or cryptocurrency from an address that looks like the Krystal Archive. I want to assure you that the Krystal Archive does not and has never done anything with Bitcoin or cryptocurrency (not counting this year's April Fool's Joke). We also never do ads, nor do we have any financial operations or schemes. We don't even have any contests going on right now. So please be aware and use your head if you received anything like this. If it's not Krystla or Star Fox related, it's probably not from the Krystal Archive.

The news just keeps coming today! We Esphirian's Star Fox fangame development in the past. Now, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Star Fox Adventures, he released a short film covering the events of what Krystal was doing just before the opening scene of the original game. It's a brutal and violent take on just how bad the SharpClaws were, and what the CloudRunners were willing to do to stop it. We also get to see flashbacks of Krystal's past and her relationship with her father. Very interesting and epic stuff. Fully voice acted with multiple characters, and Estelle Ellis also reprises her role as Krystal here. Amazing!