Sega GameGear. That thing had a better screen than any portable gaming device would for another 20+ years, but it would eat 6 AA batteries in less than an hour. There were rechargable battery packs you could get for it but they were heavy as shit and didn’t last noticeably longer, you could play it with the battery pack plugged into the charger but then you’re not actually mobile at all so you might as well play the same games on the Genesis.
Everything that was destroyed by leaking alkaline cells or stripping the battery door screws. LR44-powered toys were the worst.
It’s good that we don’t use mercury in button cells anymore, but it was exactly mercury that inhibited the off-gassing reaction that eventually leads to leakage.
pretty much all of my toys who ran on regular batteries.
I think modding older stuff to use rechargeable batteries is not too difficult. I think the harder thing is replacing the nonstandard charging ports with usb-c.
I’d love my 3ds to just have a usb-c charging ports I’m considering doing the mod myself.
You mean lithium cells ready to become spicy explosives?
I would want the great rechargeable eneloops for sure. Those would have been game changers in the good way.
Game Boy/Game Gear
Modern batteries = sealed inside the device and not replaceable, so you have to throw the device away when the battery craps out? No thanks.
Nothing I had as a kid ran on batteries. It was all springs.
You think I’m doing the “riding dinosaurs” spiel, but I’m not that old. And, yes, there were things that had batteries, but not most kid toys. I had a 3’ tall battle robot from some TV show, pre-transformers, that shot hard little plastic missiles from one fist, and the entire other fist could be spring-launched hard enough to bruise a younger sister’s forehead. Not that I’d ever have done such a thing. I had an Eagle lander from Space 1999 with detachable cockpit, which also must have been 3 or 4’ long. I had fucking lawn darts, perhaps the most incredible and incredibly dangerous weapon sold as a toy, which we would try to launch over the house into a yard we couldn’t see, and compete for who could get their’s stuck most deeply in the earth. When I was 6, I had a full-on pump-action BB gun capable of putting holes in thin plywood.
We didn’t have a lot of batteries, but we also had almost no regulation in the toy industry, and it’s honestly surprising to me today that so few of the neighborhood ended up in the hospital from just the toys.
