An alternate universe idea for handheld game saving. Let's enter What If mode...

So, back in the day of the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color (and even the Advance, for a few games), we used those nickel sized batteries for saving. They were our "memory cards" per game, keeping save data intact for years and years...

...Until they didn't. Dead battery. Boom. Years long save files all lost with no warning.

What if the Game Boy line, in its retro appearance, had kept itself going for a while longer even after the Nintendo DS came out for a few years?

Imagine the Game Boy Endurance (sequel to the Game Boy Advance) and it operates on a completely different method for saving games.

The GBE itself has the save battery inside of it. For all games you play.

This isn't a CR2032 I'm talking about; no, that poor child would get super strained and corrupted and die fast trying to hold forty or fifty saves for twenty or thirty games all at once (for the average to enthusiastic gamer).

This is an advanced battery that doubles as a type of memory card. It's a bit bigger than the CR2032, sealed in a small prism on the circuit board, with a certain amount of "save space" like memory cards on later consoles. It can hold a LOT of space, and when saving games, the UI of the GBE can actually momentarily pause the game to show you how much space you have left to save data and let you navigate your save files to adjust things as needed.

How does it keep holding data for so long?

Because it's rechargeable.

It gets recharged on the go the very moment you turn on your GBE. Every time you switch the handheld on, the power of your four AA batteries is going not only to the game you're playing, but a small trickle of it also goes to charging up this save battery which, by itself without being recharged, can STILL last up to ten or fifteen years on its own since it is, after all, an advanced save battery itself.

It gets recharged constantly by the bigger batteries used to power the console every time you turn it on (or plug in a DC cable if batteries aren't available) meaning, if you play the console even once every five years for an hour or so, you will never lose your save data on any game ever. The GBE will hold them all forever.

Even better?

Don't forget your games still have their own save batteries. These also hold the data you save onto the GBE, since they were always programmed to do that anyway (the game itself isn't aware that you're also saving onto an advanced system that has its own superpowered save battery, so it functions like normal and puts the save on its own battery).

If you load up a game with saves different from the ones stored on the GBE (maybe you played Pokémon Yellow on your Game Boy Pocket for a bit and saved there), then when starting the game, the GBE will recognise the difference and ask you if you want to load the game's own battery save, or instead load in the GBE save.

Also, it will ask if you want to overwrite the cartridge battery saves or keep those separate, although I can't imagine that's a function most people would care about, but it'd be nice to have even as a backup to simply extend the number of saves you can have. It won't ask this every time you save ever, by default, but in the GBE system settings you can choose to turn this feature on if you want.

Wanna play Pokémon with two profiles instead of one? Or, heck, with the GBE's extended save file functionality, how about several?

Hey there Pokémon Ruby, I'm both Landon AND May at the same time!

Huh?! Landon TALKS IF YOU PLAY AS MAY?! SILENT PROTAGONIST, MY A----

Sorry, got sidetracked there.

So, what do you Game Boyers think? Something you'd have enjoyed back in the day, released as a successor to the Game Boy Advance?