Star Fox actor comes out of retirement for a Half-Life 2 mod that replaces Alyx with a sexy blue fox

pcgamer.com:

If you've ever thought to yourself that the one thing that could make Half-Life 2 better is a sexy blue fox in place of Alyx Vance, you've probably played Gagnetar's Alyx Replacement mod for Half-Life 2 that swaps out Eli Vance's daughter for Krystal, the primary heroine of the Star Fox series.

The mod was originally released in 2017 and got a significant upgrade in early 2018, but now it's taken an even bigger step into the big-time with the addition of original Krystal voice actor Estelle Ellis, who is doing «a complete rework of Alyx's lines» for the mod. It's an especially remarkable get because Ellis hasn't done any videogame voice acting for close to 20 years: Mobygames lists her most recent credit as Perfect Dark Zero in 2005.

Despite the long time away, she apparently didn't miss a step. «In spite of doing virtually no voice acting work for well over a decade, she sounds quite natural as Krystal in this fan mod,» says the Krystal Archive, a fan site dedicated to «everyone's favorite blue vixen.»

«For that extra bit of polish, Gagnetar even took the trouble to rewrite some of the lines to fit better with Krystal as a character in the game world, rather than simply doing a word-for-word recreation,» the archive says.

The whole Starfox-meets-Half Life thing is kind of a weird mashup, but it does look, and sound, quite good, in both the Kleiner lab demo above, and the Eli lab demo below:

As for how Gagnetar was able to convince Ellis to reprise her role for the mod, he said in the comments on the Kleiner video that he's been talking with her on and off for years, and «decided to just get her a decent microphone and we worked from there.» He also said she requested a reduction in the model's «chest physics,» which is