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[jetjevons]

So all this Xbox 360 talk of no pack in HDD and expensive memory cards got me thinking about the "good old days" where you had the option of writing down a password for your savegame! Does anyone actually remember doing that? What was the last "big" game that had a password save option? I remember writing down ludicrously big passwords for some games, I just can't rememebr which. Where there any PSOne or Saturn games with passwords?

 

[Matlock]

There have been some GBA games recently that have had password save features.

 

[jetjevons]

Man that is so cheap! Can you imagine what an Oblivion password would like?

 

[Laguna X]

Where there any PSOne or Saturn games with passwords?

Panzer General for the Playstation utilized passwords for game saves. It also allowed you to save via memory card if passwords weren't your thing. Personally, I never cared for the passwords, but back then we didn't have much of a choice.

 

[jetjevons]

Hey could you - potentially - use your PC HDD for game saves? If you had a wireless connection or something?

 

[Fuzzy]

I remember looking at the passwords for Lemmings and Puzznic and being able to figure out the pattern so that I could skip levels if I couldn't beat them.

 

[jetjevons]

I remember looking at the passwords for Lemmings and Puzznic and being able to figure out the pattern so that I could skip levels if I couldn't beat them.

That's pretty hardcore.

 

[NumbNuts]

You might all notice that there's no DS games with Password saves. Nintendo no longer allow publishers to take advantage of the public, and EEPROM is mandatory for all games now. Hooray!

 

[hobbitx]

Ugh! I still break out into cold sweats at night thinking about those Super Ninja Boy and TLOR passwords. Sometimes even the games themselves couldn't handle all that data, I remember by the time I'd get near the end, some games would just stop generating working passcodes and I'd have to finish the old fashion way. :lol

 

[MightyHedgehog]

Passwords, even the paragraph-length ones weren't so bad...it just sucked when you lost them or the game featured the worst possible font, making 1s turn into Ls and 0s into Os and even worse.

 

[suaveric]

Who invented the passcode? Was it Nintendo with games like Metroid?

 

[etiolate]

JUSTIN BAILEY > PC Gaming for Dummies

 

[Tarazet]

I remember Crash Bandicoot and Skullmonkeys for PSX both used password saves. Didn't hinder them.. but those were some long-ass passwords.

 

[DeEJaYMiND]

I remember looking at the passwords for Lemmings and Puzznic and being able to figure out the pattern so that I could skip levels if I couldn't beat them.

OMG!! You are just like John Nash

 

[OpinionatedCyborg]

King's Quest V for the NES: you'd think getting back into the game after dying would be easy. After all, it's a point and click, trial and error experience that punishes the smallest of errors with death. Got a little too close to that bear? Dead. Looked at the evil goldfish the wrong way? Dead. Forgot to bring magical crampons for mountain climbing? Dead.

But no.

Instead, death brings a short message along the lines of "Sorry, Graham, but you're fucking dead -- here's an unfunny pun to laugh at," before supplying you with a password and no option to simply continue. If the password was 4 images/characters, inputting it would've been a mild annoyance. Of course, it wasn't just a couple characters: it was 15 seemingly random numbers and letters.

 

[dog$]

Who invented the passcode? Was it Nintendo with games like Metroid?

It was that generation, yeah.
As far as if it's specifially Metroid, that depends if it was released before Dragon Quest I; DQ came out May 27 of 86, and Metroid was somewhere in 86; I can't find a specific date.

 

[djtiesto]

You haven't lived until you put in a Swords and Serpents password. It's some old NES 3D dungeon hack RPG that plays more like an old PC RPG than a Japanese one. And it's terrible. Not to mention the password system was so awful: You had to put in a game password, then a password for each of your party members. And each password was like 20-30 characters (both capital, uppercase, and numeric). If you copied down ONE character wrong, you were fucked. It took about 20 minutes to enter in a password, literally.

 

[maharg]

King's Quest V for the NES: you'd think getting back into the game after dying would be easy. After all, it's a point and click, trial and error experience that punishes the smallest of errors with death. Got a little too close to that bear? Dead. Looked at the evil goldfish the wrong way? Dead. Forgot to bring magical crampons for mountain climbing? Dead.

wtf, there was a version of KQ5 for NES?