The PAX Prime Trail: Passwords, Thankfully a Thing of the Past.
August 24, 2012
Yeah, chech this shit out, I am all about the continuity over here. Back in the day when an NPC told you to remember a password, you remembered that damn password! You had too, passwords were the only way to play most of the longer games of the 3rd and 4th generation. Now there was an alternative. Two very vivid memories in my gaming life were getting the original Legend of Zelda, well I didn't personally get it, it was a birthday present for my brother, and actually my Mom was the first one to beat it, but I digress. The original Legend of Zelda on the NES forgoed the password systems that needed to be implemented in the NES releases of games like Metroid and Kid Icarus, and instead used a battery backed save system. No need for a password, it was awesome! Clearly a game like Zelda isn't meant to be played in a single session, and to be able to pick up and play where you left off was a thing of beauty. But I said there were two memories.
The second memory would be the day the battery in Zelda died. That was the downside to the save systems on the old cartridge based games. The batteries eventually die, and when they do the save feature no longer works. So yeah, in retrospect maybe the password systems had an advantage in the long run.Then again it's kind of a mote point for Zelda at this point, seeing as I'm known to annihilate that game in a single sitting now a days.