2010: The Year of… Password Sharing?
Much to personal dismay but Destructoid praise, it has been announced that the DSs upcoming Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey will feature an archaic password system for Demon Sharing.
While the concept of passing on help to fellow players in the form of demons particularly suited to specific battles or areas of the game is perfectly sound, the content delivery system itself seems a bizarre choice.
Surely if a player wishes to share an expertly skill sculpted minion locally, the DS is able to interact over Wi-Fi as evidenced in everything from Pictochat onwards. For transfers further afield, doesn’t the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection fit requirement exactly? Even the sound sharing system for level trade built into Bangai-O Spirits would be preferable to entering a mass of hexadecimal digits; the added step of uploading your glitchy sample onto a file sharing network a small price to pay for the revolutionarily innovative experience.
When the Gameboy Advance first released, IGN published a review of GT Advance Championship Racing which carried the tag-line “find out how it’s possible to nearly ruin one of the best racing games on the Game Boy Advance” in reference to the game’s 16 digit password save. While Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey’s passwords facilitate an optional part of the game’s no-doubt sprawling content, it still seems counter-productive that anything released nine years on would demand a player to enter numbers, letters and symbols when we’ve grown so used to wirelessly interacting with both friends and strangers.
Still, thank the relevant deity or atheistic false-idol that we’ll be tapping codes rather than miserably scrolling through alphabets using our handheld’s d-pad.
Hate to break it to you, but Wi-Fi on the DS sucks dude. Unless you’re close enough for a direct link, or at a place dumb enough to use WEP, you’re never going to use it. I’d take this over reconfiguring my router every time anyday.
And why are you comparing it to a password save system? This is for sharing content with others, hardly a core requirement for playing the game. If anything these “passwords” are more like “cheat codes”.
I did mention moments after the GT link that SMT:SJ’s password system wasn’t game breaking due to it “facilitating an optional part of the game”.
However, I stand by the accusation that its inclusion seems unnecessarily dated. If you’re going to the hassle of sharing these “cheat codes” over the internet, presumably, for the majority of us currently using a wireless set-up in our homes anyway, the range of the DS won’t be a massive issue.
And, even if I back down to partially excuse the system for sharing long range, one would assume that local trading over Wi-Fi was an absolute no brainer; its omittance unquestionably archaic whichever way its approached.
Right, but you still mentioned password saves which really doesn’t have anything to do with what you were talking about.
And I stand by the fact that unless it’s a direct system to system link wireless on the DS is wank. Shame they never issued a firmware update to add something other than shitty WEP.
OK, it was meant as a comparison between time and technologies. The password itself was the linking factor.
GT used a password save system despite cartridge, battery-backed S-RAM being the norm. SMT is choosing to use a password sharing system, despite wireless transmission becoming one of this handheld generation’s defining feature.