play THE PLAYSTATION (GER) December 2005 / Vol 9, No. 13 / Holiday Issue For the 10th anniversary of the PlayStation brand, German magazine play THE PLAYSTATION ran a 7 page spread titled "Happy Birthday PlayStation!" to congratulate the PlayStation on 10 years of exceptional success and to look back at the console's origin, its development and its launch, and also things like special edition models, the PocketStation, the creation of the PS logo and of course the original PlayStation's successor, The PS2. The last part of the retrospective is titled "BEAUTY COMES WITH AGE" and briefly looks at the graphical evolution of polygon characters on the PlayStation systems throughout the 10 years covered in the article. It always makes me happy to see when magazines try to not go with the most obvious choice for such categories, namely Lara Croft. Nina's regular outings on Sony's consoles and the continuous improvement of her in-game character model really make her a shining example to prove that beauty does indeed come with age (..if you're a non-aging video game character in a virtual world, that is).
"Over the years PlayStation saw a number of video game characters emerge, growing with the console. Names like Lara Croft or Nina Williams come to mind. Using the attractive Tekken amazon as an example, we depict a coarsely-pixelated PlayStation heroine evolve into a smart PS2 beauty. And there's no end in sight for Nina's remarkable career. Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is currently rumoured for PS3."
...Rumours of a PlayStation3 TTT2 in 2005? Well, it took an awfully long 7 years, but those rumours turned out to be true after all. (!) I will have to research if this magazine, at one point, also happened to be predicting a Death by Degrees 2...
I've always gotten the impression that Nina has found more popularity from European gamers than Japanese or American ones...this feels like further proof of that. It's a nice admission of both Tekken's (previous) standing as one of the PlayStation's signature brands, and of Nina as one of the key foundations of said brand.
ReplyDeleteAlso: seeing each 'version' of Nina lined up like that really does highlight how odd in hindsight her T2 and T4 stances were. Very hunched and kind of uncomfortable to look at; mostly everything about Nina's fighting style is streamlined and efficient, so her stance should be, if not relaxed, then at least straightforward enough to hold for extended times without cramping her muscles.
(TBH, they really need to tweak it again for the next Tekken - I'm getting tired of seeing her right elbow clip through her breasts. >_< )
Absolutely. I just remembered watching a live stream of the Tekken Club Night thing that happened during Gamescom 2012. Harada and the Tekken sound team /Tohyama, Sano, Inoue, Hosoe etc all present. And I think it was right before Sano was going to perform, he asks the audience who their favourite Tekken character was, and then you basically hear a room full of Germans shouting "NINA!!!". Too good! Sano was like "...Nina...?!?". His favourite was Yoshimitsu IIRC, whatever. But yeah, you'd never see this happen in Japan or the US.
DeleteAlso, this is the first time I've noticed how similarly hunched her Tekken 2 stance is to 4's. Thanks for pointing out. I still like T3/TTT's the best (here we go again) but many people complain it looks weird. Tekken 4 is the worst though. Do not repeat, Namco!
I agree with you on the T3/TTT stance, with the slight caveat that the animation for it (i.e. the slight 'bobbing' up and down she does when standing neutral) is a bit too fast for my liking. The same thing was true with her T4 and T5 stances, and it was especially problematic when you took her to the Arctic level of T5; the misting-breath effect they use for all the characters is tied into the neutral bobbing, so Nina looks like she's hyperventilating. <_< If the T3 stance could be slowed down to the more moderate pace of the T6 stance, it'd be perfect.
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