Pokémon Pinball

I was feeling a bit nostalgic last night (it was a thunderstorm, too), so I pulled out my Game Boy Advance SP and Pokémon Pinball for a little gaming. To my surprise, it worked quite well (there was a time when none of my original Game Boy games worked for some reason (December 2007, according to a forum post I made a while back) and that put me off of Nintendo portables for a while (I did get a Wii that month, however). So I was racking up a high score in the Blue table when I realized that the Rumble wasn't working, and I know I had turned it on. There was always supposed to be a pleasant buzz when Pikachu recharged your ball so it wouldn't drop down and cause you to lose it, but that buzz wasn't there.

So I cracked open the cartridge itself (after saving and turning it off) and discovered a Heavy-Duty Panasonic AAA with Japanese lettering on it, and I realized that this was the original battery, finally giving out after years of storage and off-and-on usage. It had been there for about 12 years. I replaced the AAA battery and found that the Rumble was back in full force, stronger than ever, but perhaps a bit too strong. The European version had a way to configure the rumble (of course, it also had pre-set configurations instead of choosing your own set-up). The genuine surprise was that even though the AAA battery had gone dead, there was no corrosion or leakage (unlike those "Kingever" batteries that were in my TI-84 Plus...I could pour baking soda on it and watch it fizzle).

Chalk it up to superior products, I suppose.