Password (video Gaming) - Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages and Disadvantages

Although passwords are seen as archaic by modern standards, they still carry a number of advantages over memory saving, including:

• Portability of passwords: they can be carried over any medium without requiring extra accessories such as memory cards or similar memory transfer media. In the cartridge-based games, it's also possible to continue playing in different cartridges, without losing progress changing between them.
• Always work: while saved media is prone to corruption, passwords (as long as the media is kept safe) will always work. Some cartridges with built-in backup batteries manufactured in the golden age of 16-bit consoles (between 1990 and 1995) also have their batteries worn by now due to overuse, and more recently, users of Memory Cards could lose progress in a game if the card was physically damaged or had some kind of interference that corrupted data while operating.
• Resume anytime: in console games (until the hard drive-based Xbox appeared), there was a limited space that could be used to store games, which could become a problem, particularly in sports games: if a player wants to keep a list of final matches, he needs to acquire a new memory card for each handful of finals. With passwords, although no other statistics are saved, this problem does not exist.
• Independent of version: While in some games installing a patch can render all previously saved games unusable, passwords will always work unless the algorithm behind the password generation is changed.
• Sharing: Once a password was acquired, anyone could use it. If a player unlocked a secret, power-up, extra levels, etc., or reached the last level of a game and acquired the password, he or she could publish and share it with anyone. This allowed players to access parts of a game they did not earn themselves.
• Infinite Amounts: Cartridge based game saves are limited in quantity by the amount of RAM on the cartridge. Most cartridges save between 1 and 4 saves. But with passwords, you can have as many different saves as you want.
• Undo: Once you save over a file or a memory slot, you cannot bring it back. But with passwords, you can always go back to the password you last typed in.

There are, however, several disadvantages:

• Complexity and necessity of human input: some passwords, even for older games, can be over 20 characters long. Not only are they hard and take time to input, but a single error transcribing the password from the screen to the paper could mean a useless password. There can also be interpretation errors, such as confusing 0 (the number zero) and O (the letter "O"), although these code confusions are easily tested and fixed. Some of the later games only had non-ambiguous characters to overcome this problem (such as having either the letter O or the number 0, the letter l or the number 1, etc. and not both). An unusual variant is in The Magic of Scheherazade, which features semi-fault tolerant passwords: passwords between 1 and 5 incorrect characters still work to a limited degree, preserving the stage one has achieved, but not the player's attributes.
• Separate media: the medium used by the player to store passwords acquired—usually a piece of paper, a corner or a blank page of the manual—if not kept properly, is susceptible to loss or damage: ink can fade away, pages can be lost, etc.
• Fewer variables stored: considering the complexity limit, passwords can't hold more than a few variables, which means that they are not practical for variable-oriented games such as RPGs and racing games; sports games are stripped of statistics and, since saving mid-level usually requires an impractical amount of data, strategy games have to be organized into levels to be completed in one sitting.
• No records: it is also completely impractical to save records of the game, such as "fastest run in a level", "highest score", user statistics, "fastest lap", "total time played", etc.