Somehow I missed this when I posted that hour of Dinosaur Planet footage. IOnEI Falcon has a site called Rare Minion where he collects and displays a huge amount of information on Rare games. He has somehow obtained a ridiculous amount of details on the story and background of Dinosaur Planet. Just look at the info in that image! That's just half of one page on Krystal. There are many pages and pages of documents on his site. I haven't even had time to read them all.

I've spoken with IOnEI Falcon yesterday, and he has allowed the archiving of his information here. Just like I'm doing with some of my Star Fox assets, I will be making a Dinosaur Planet Archive when I'm finished restoring the Krystal Archive. I already have permission to post the content of celebi23's Dinosaur Planet Media Archive, which also contains a bunch of new information.

With the research obtained last weekend, I was able to reclaim data from after the hack, including the posts, comments, and edits to pages made between January and March 2012. Kat the Leopardess is assisting me in modernizing old posts (fixing links, changing how we do YouTube embeds, etc). I added the YouTube hiding technique code to the Podcast page as well, so it takes less time to load. And with all the progress I've made restoring pages to the site recently, we may have the site fully operational in a very short time.

Sorry for such a delay getting everything back together. This has been a very busy year for me. It's still busy. It's just that I've learned some key techniques at my job as a game programmer that allows me to do more work more efficiently.

The Video section has been restored! I've cleaned up the display so videos are easy to view without being too intrusive. As with the Audio section, the content is divided up by game.

I found several new videos of Dinosaur Planet (and am working on getting permission to post them here directly). You will find links to those new videos on the Dinosaur Planet Videos page.

Back in 2010, when I was still co-owner of Starfox-Online.net, I finally got around to posting all of the voice acting files I found in the source code of Star Fox Adventures. It took a long time because I wrote out all the subtitles for every single file! That's 730 sets of dialog, folks!

While the files are still on Starfox-Online, they are no longer in an easily consumable format. So, for historical/archival reasons, I'm making them available here. I put these up because someone was asking about them. I still have tons of other Star Fox-related stuff that's not specifically Krystal-related. Once the KA has been fully restored, I will organize and upload those Star Fox things too.

The other half of this weekend's project. I've finally restored another section of the site, the Audio section. It's been reorganized slightly to consolidate several pages into one. All audio files have had their ID3 tags updated to be consistent. All external links for the voice actresses have been updated and checked.

Working through it, I found a couple of tasks to do. Anyone who wants to help work on either of these research tasks is encouraged to do so. Just email me.

1. We have no audio of Krystal's cameos in the Japanese version of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. We don't even know who the voice actress is in that version
2. We still don't have ripped versions of the audio from Star Fox Assault, so all voice clips have some background noise or music

On Saturday, I was doing some maintenance. Some of you may have seen the site go down briefly. I just wanted to let you know that I've finished some research and now I'm confident that I can fully backup the Krystal Archive at the database level. This means we will never have another hacking incident on the scale of the one we had last March. Every single feature on the site will now be restorable with relatively little trouble. It's now just a matter of getting everything back online. More on that later tonight.

The Krystal Archive has always had the goal of being completely family friendly and appropriate for all ages (or at least teen-friendly). We have quite a few pre-teen readers of the site, believe it or not. When it comes to fan-made content, there's always a judgement call. Fanart can be judged appropriate or not with a mere glance, and fanfilms just take 5 or 6 minutes tops. Fanfiction, however, takes a really long time to read and review.

Here on the Krystal Archive, we've always accepted incomplete fanfiction, reviewing only the parts complete at the time. This should generally be ok, but there's always the chance that the author could create later chapters that go against our guidelines. After thinking hard on this, and discussing this with Kat the Leopardess (who is helping with the KA Restoration Project), I've decided that a change is in order.

As soon as I can do so, I will be removing any fanfictions from the list that are not complete, including my own. If a fanfiction has become complete since it was reviewed, I'll try and get those final chapters reviewed quickly so the stories can be put back on the list. For those fanfictions that are still incomplete, I will attempt to contact the authors and work out a solution. Newly submitted fanfictions will not be reviewed until they are complete.

RamTheDragon, aka Sofia, dressed as Krystal at ConComics 2012, about a month ago. Like Kat the Leopardess and Bridgette Rockette before her, RamTheDragon's costume is bodypaint-based. She has a facial prosthetic created by Northfur FX and a staff just like Krystal's. She really enjoyed herself and has been wanting to cosplay as Krystal for a long time. More photos and info coming soon.

• Photo 1
• Photo 2
• Photo 3

Thanks to Kat The Leopardess for the info.

In my ongoing efforts to restore the Krystal Archive to its former self after the March hacking incident, today I proudly announce the restoration of the Images section. You can find it in the navigation. It's been simplified a lot. The images are now broken up into pages not based on the game, but on the type of image. The types are...

• Promo Images - Usually pre-rendered images to be used by magazines and websites
• Screenshots - Screenshots of Krystal from her various appearances in games
• Wallpapers - Official computer wallpapers
• Sprites - Star Fox Command's Krystal-related sprites
• Boxart - American and Japanese box art that features Krystal

Enjoy!

Retro Studios is working on something unannounced, and has been since at least December 2011. Their track-building and asset creation for Mario Kart 7 finished with its release that month. However, new evidence posted today seems to indicate that some employees were working on something else during and after the development of Mario Kart 7. Actually this is very reasonable. Retro Studios only contributed art and design assets for a significant portion of the courses in Mario Kart 7. This begs the question: what were their programmers doing...?

Through various news reports in the past few months, and some from today, we're fairly certain that their current project...

• Is not a Zelda game (source)
• Is for the Wii U, a game "everyone wants us to do" (source)
• Has enemies and bosses (source)
• Has cutscenes (source)
• Has dynamic environment and weather effects (source)
• Very likely to have a non-photorealistic style (hand-drawn textures specifically) (source)

It's a game "everyone wants [them] to do", so it's not a new IP. It's not Zelda. It has bosses and enemies, so it's not a racer, but an action game of some kind. Could be a new Donkey Kong game, but they just finished one, and I haven't seen any major demand on that front, quality though it was. All the other IPs are either already well covered by other studios or don't match well with what we know. I think it comes down to either Metroid or Star Fox. There are a large number of people wanting a new Retro Studios game for both those IPs, myself included.

Then there was that major rumor from just before E3 about a Metroid/Star Fox Crossover game. In the end, it was retracted with the statement that, though they aren't working on a crossover game, it was considered for a time.

All of the evidence we've seen could apply equally well to Metroid or Star Fox, except one: the non-realistic style. That doesn't seem to fit either series too well. Since their beginning, with minor exceptions, both Metroid and Star Fox games have traditionally pushed graphical boundaries in realism. I'd like to propose a possible solution to this quandary.

Watch this video. It's a trailer for a game I've been keeping tabs on called EX Troopers.

See that? This game features cell shading, edge rendering, anime-styled characters, and effect and cutscenes inspired by manga panels. It looks fantastic in my humble opinion. What's great about this art style is that it's relatively cheap from a programming standpoint, which means you can have more enemies on screen and have larger environments you wouldn't be able to do if you spent more time making your rendering highly realistic. Non-photorealistic styles also have the advantage of never looking dated like more realistic games do. Wind Waker still looks just as good as it did the day it came out, but Ocarina of Time is looking pretty dated these days.

Is it too much of a stretch to say that Star Fox would be the perfect fit for this? You've already got cartoon animals in space ships, why isn't this already a manga? If I were going to make a Star Fox game, this is how I would make it. Not the gameplay, the anime-like graphical style. I held this view long before today's new information about the non-photorealistic style and hand-drawn textures came out. Weeks ago, I personally looked into what it would take to make an anime-style Star Fox game using my skills as a graphics programmer, and I found it very applicable. So I'm sure it will come as no surprise when I say that more than any other, I hope Retro's project is Star Fox.