about.me



I first saw Nina Williams on a screen that was put up in a store to promote the release of Tekken on the PlayStation. I was hooked ever since. It was 1995 and I was still a very young boy obsessing over his SNES. This was the first time I had ever seen a videogame character in 3D and this blonde blocky low poly woman was a character unlike anything I had ever seen in a videogame before. She was beautiful, mysterious and kicking the shit out of the other characters. Needless to say she got me at Hello, and my obsession shifted.

She became to me what Mario has been to gamers all over the world for so long and what that nuclear bomb that was soon to be unleashed on the world, namely Lara Croft, became to so many others during that time... a symbol of sorts, a bit of a childhood hero, my personal 'SUPERMAN' 'BATMAN'. She was the fictional character I grew up with.

Many years later I'm now looking at what might just be the biggest collection of Nina Williams merchandise in the world. When I was a child I could only dream of the many things I'm bringing home from trips to Japan now. In a way I'm a child again when I find these things in some weird little store, things that I missed out on growing up in Europe where this stuff just wasn't available /which basically applies to the rest of the world. In a way I'm a very serious collector now and judging by the crazy-useless shit that I buy I certainly am a bit of a nerd, too. It's fair to say prolly every collector has that nerdy quality to him.

The thing I - as a fan - was always missing though, was a place dedicated solely to Nina Williams, where I could gather all the latest news concerning her and the games she stars in, browse through countless pictures (maybe even find some that I hadn't seen before, for they were never released anywhere else on the net), a place that would deal with the character in a more in-depth kind of way...

Well, since nobody else is doing it: Welcome to blonde.bomb, this is where I'll share my nerdy little obsession passion for all things Nina Williams with whoever stumbles over this site. Enjoy


9 comments:

  1. Hello, I am so happy to find this site. Nina is like my sister after all those years and I love her so much, thank you so much for putting up all these amazing stuff about her. (I'm a girl btw, don't get me wrong lol)

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    1. Hi there Anna! Many thanks for leaving me such a nice comment, it is much appreciated :-)

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  2. Aw, just got around to reading this part. Wish I'd ever had the money, time and remembered-to-keep-valid passport needed to go on trips to Japan...where I'd no doubt embarass myself and potentially cause an international incident, but, screw it, at least I'd buy cool stuff. :P

    Since I'm here, though, I figure this is as good a place as any to gush about my history with Nina. First of all, an admission that makes me sad - I did not notice Nina in the first Tekken game. I know, I know, but in my defense I was very young back then, still in primary school. My mind wasn't really formed yet. So when I first played Tekken at the home of a friend, my only friend at the time to own a PlayStation, I wound up picking JACK instead, mostly because he was, y'know, really big and a robot, and an older friend had lended me his Transformers VHSes so I really liked robots. *shrug* Anyway, I didn't play the game much, and forgot about it fairly quickly.

    Then - and I can never remember exactly how old I was at this point, but this one moment always stands out to me - I first discovered Tekken 2 as an arcade machine at a shopping centre when my family and I were making a stop on a long road trip. I never got to play on the machine - didn't have any change and my mum had shops she wanted to drag me around - but the noises and rapid flashes from the machine running through its demo mode kept drawing my eyes across, and when Nina showed up...I couldn't look away. I just stood there, staring, silently willing her on to beat up that guy I didn't know was a Jackie Chan impersonator then. I winced whenever she got hurt and felt like jumping for joy when she won, whether there was a player involved or not. Looking back, I still can't tell what it was about Tekken 2 especially that made me feel that way; the gameplay and graphics didn't look or feel much changed from T1 and I wouldn't grow to adore the series as a whole until T3. Perhaps it was simply my growing up from the "girls? eww!" phase of boyhood to the "huh, girls are nice" stage. Maybe it was just Nina's wardrobe makeover - she definitely had better-looking outfits in T2 (I found myself rooting for camo-catsuit Nina over purple-dress Nina in mirror fights, fyi). Whatever the case, Nina made an impression that day.

    Which brings me to Tekken 3. I still didn't have a PlayStation by the time of its release, but I was attending an after-school kids' club which did, and T3 was never far from the disc slot. The gameplay update, mostly making everything faster, seemed to gel with me, and Nina, well, she was stunning. I think what really started to stand out about her, for me, was that she wasn't a 'girly' girl, in the way that the other girls in the game were. She didn't make dainty motions with her hands, or giggle like a doofus, or twirl like a ballerina. Every motion was firm and strong and confident, and that laugh, man, it spawned feelings in me I didn't have words for. I needed to know more about this woman and what she was about. Why was she shown rising from a pool of water? What was up with that graveyard in her little ending video? What kind of idiot would pick Anna over her if he saw them both on a beach?! (TBC)

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    1. (cont.)

      Eventually, thanks to instruction manuals written back in the days when they were actually designed to provide information plus my early internet wanderings, I got my answers (well, except for the beach thing, that's still a mystery for the ages) even as I again grew up and T3 disappeared for a few years that, funnily enough, I remember little of. This was during a time when my gaming habits were exclusively Nintendo; the N64 was the first home console I owned, and I stayed loyal to it and the GameCube for a good long while - and though I wouldn't take back a moment of those years, the one thing those systems couldn't give me was Nina. Hell, they could barely manage a second-rate replacement (with due acknowledgement to the mighty Samus Aran - nothing wrong with her, great character, love her too for various reasons bu-u-ut she took her sweet time arriving with Metroid Prime and just wasn't the same). The IMO underrated Tekken Advance helped a little, but eventually I had to swallow whatever pride I got from being a devout Nintendo fanboy and get my own PS2.

      And things have been going smoothly ever since that day. I've been following Nina with every new game, through every image revamp and every surprise - from wondering why on Earth she sometimes had silver hair in Tekken Tag, to that moment of panic when I first booted up Tekken 4 and couldn't see her on the character select screen, to flipping through every colour option for her in Tekken 5 before deciding that, nahhh, she should stick with the purple. Sometimes, I've had to take the rough with the smooth, like how those rewarding little moments in Death by Degrees where Nina shrugs off a ruined dress or rolls her eyes over science gobbledegook totally justify those hair-pulling moments of frustration (damn you insta-death gun turrets and fiddly timed laser tripwires!). Or every time my heart skips a beat when they announce special outfits for the latest game, only to drop again when, yup, they ignored Nina in favour of some jailbait tramp who's been around all of five minutes, again.

      But, I never let my love falter. Even if the developers who created Nina don't begin to appreciate how special she is - and given that their attempts at female character creations for the past few games have been a succession of disappointments that demonstrate the exact opposite of the ideals that Nina stands for, I feel justified in saying they really have no clue at all - she will always be special to me, and I know now, to you as well. That's what the existence of this site means to me: proof that I'm not the only one who sees Nina the way she deserves to be seen. The true way.

      That was rambling as all hell, but, I feel better for saying it. :)

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    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    3. -CENSORED-
      Oh God, what the hell... I already knew I had a few too many when it took me twice as long as usual to get back home, but going through the endless drivel I put down yesterday makes me wonder how drunk exactly I was... Tearing up? Shitty partys? Shakespeare and Keats? Well I hope you read what I had to say (..actually I hope you didn't lol) But this had to go!
      How did I forget to update the countdown and instead write the longest reply ever? I must have been deeply moved by your comment, haha. Well, it is a wonderful comment and I'm very happy you told your story here!
      I'll just quote the only reasonable line I wrote yesterday:
      Mr. MacDonald, it's a pleasure having you around! Thank you.

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  3. Hi there, I want to thank you for creating this amazing Site, Nina is my all time fave Female Character in game History!

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    1. :-) Happy to hear you like the blog! Thanks for leaving a comment.

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    2. Hey there cool website not a lot of people realise it's not just a game but the impact it has on some people growing up with this. Nina reminds me of like a James bond who is my inspiration also somewhere out there there's someone like Nina it could be anybody great minds will think alike farewell.

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