Running a GameCube (23 watts) literally nonstop for a year would use a little over 200 kWh.
Assuming average USA electricity prices, in 2002 electricity cost ~$0.09 per kWh, so one year of that would cost an additional $18.00. That number only tends worse going forward.
A GameCube memory card would cost about $11.
As usual, it’s more expensive to be poor.
I call counterfeit and homoerotic.
Fabricated and jolly, I say!
I didn’t know GC memory cards were hotswappable…
Old-school proprietary memory cards like that generally are, because they don’t mount a filesystem in the way a modern flash drive would.
You can safely remove the card without problem as long as there is no current write operation happening.
You often needed to switch memory card to change between games, depending which card your save was on, and people would certainly not turn the console off to do that, nor does the GameCube manual say you should.
It’s actually still not a sad story! Because eventually they would have had to turn it off or they would lose electricity. This marked the start of their new saveable journey!
:(
