When I was still in.. college? Is that what it translates to in english? Probably. Anyways, it was many years ago. Nintendo DS was out and a small pokemon boom was in my class. Some brought gameboys with their old games as well, me among them. Cue horror story after the break.

So I was one of those who brought their GBC along with Pokemon Gold. Showed the Mew and Celebi I got through trades and such, battled a bit etc. All fine until a few days passed and……. My savegame was gone. This was the 2nd time (First being a neighborhood kid deleting it through a gameshark, the asshole).

After much rage and cursing, I looked at some of my other gameboy games.
Mario seemed to have disappeared as well, even my Tetris hiscores!
Painfully started Gold up again and asked a friend if he could clone his mew for me.
He gave me the cartridge so I’d do it at home with the two GBCs I had.
Welp, his save was gone too. Sorry Alex D:

Even new saves were deleted, so I just ended up thinking that my GBCs were deleting savegames.
Now fast-forward to yesterday where I learn that Gameboy games use a little battery in the cartridge to keep those savegames alive. After googling, many many games their batteries have died by now. You can still play the games, it just won’t save anything – unless you manually replace those batteries.

I haven’t really checked my other GB games, like DBZ, Yellow and Crystal, but they’re probably all dead. Rip Shiny Ditto that I got through abusing a glitch between Yellow and Crystal. It was an amazing glitch though.. iirc, it was along the lines of teaching a pokemon mimic, then vs a ditto in yellow turn it into a transform battle and then catch it, send to crystal and it was a shiny because of number fuckery.

Now I’m probably moving to a new room end of the year or early next, and I was planning to play my N64 lots because I honestly never got to because it was stored elsewhere and no TV blablabla.
I got a bit paranoid, thinking that maybe my N64 savegames were all dead too. I still had Zelda to finish!

Dusted off the console and checked if games with little to no progress were still working.
Star Wars Podracer worked fine, Conker’s save was still there.
Eh, should be good.

Then I just had to google more as my paranoid self always does and saw it’s not really an issue since most N64 games that save in-cart save in a sort of flash memory… But which game doesn’t and still uses a battery? Ocarina of Time.

Smashed that game in, saw my savefile was still there and played the living hell out of it before that battery died! Thankfully I was at the end of Spirit Temple (Twinrova Boss Fight), but it took me like.. an hour or so to figure out where I was and what I was doing and htf to get up that statue again. Ran up half of Death Mountain to get the Biggoron Sword – WHEN I WAS WIELDING IT. D’oh moment there.

So I finally finished Ocarina of Time after almost two decades. Woo! (..OoT Zelda still throws me off, as I keep thinking of her Twilight Princess design.)
That screen-freeze at THE END confused me a bit, but apparently games did that a lot back then instead of going back to the menu.

..now to finally finish FF9. I kinda shelved it again before the final dungeon.