Pokémon Gold problems

The other day I finally got round to making a start on Pokémon Gold, which I bought a few weeks ago for my GBA SP. I played for about an hour and then saved my game, but the next day when I turned the game on there was no option to continue from where I'd finished. I tried starting another game and saving, but when I turned on and off the save file was lost again.

I figured that the save battery inside the cart must have died. I remember my friend mentioning he'd lost the ability to save on his copy of Gold recently too, and after doing a bit of research this seems to be a universal problem with all Gold and Silver carts. Released in Europe in April 2001, I'd forgotten just how old these games are, and it seems that the save batteries all died around 2006. I believe this relatively short life span is due to the use of an oscillator which controls the in-game clock, using up battery power. So whilst versions of Pokémon Red and Blue were released before Gold and Silver, the battery has lasted longer because of the absence of an in-game clock (although the batteries in Red and Blue will go eventually - probably sometime soon, if not already).

But I wasn't about to give up on playing Pokémon Gold, and I found a really useful message board thread which details how to replace the battery yourself. The batteries they recommend are fairly expensive though, so I wondered if Nintendo could replace the battery for me instead.

Repairs for GBC games aren't mentioned on the Nintendo UK website, but I phoned up and found out that it would cost £15 to replace the battery, which is kinda expensive, but not too bad. The guy was quite nice about the whole thing, and understood the problem. I think it's good that they do provide this service, but maybe Nintendo should have foreseen the whole problem and done something about it, as 5 or 6 years isn't a very long life-span for a game as awesome as Pokémon Gold. It's also a shame for people who've built up a good collection of Pokémon to lose everything, although there are a couple of ways around this. You could either transfer all your monsters to a game such as Pokémon Colosseum, or it should also be possible to replace a save battery whilst the cart is hooked up to an external power supply, so as not to lose the save data, but that could be quite tricky.

Anyway, I'm gonna post my cart off to Nintendo soon, and I think it'll get sent to Germany to be fixed before being sent back to me within 3 weeks time. But I hope it's sooner than that - I really want to play this game!