I ran our 'big' camera on Lithium before, ~500 pictures. Tried Eneloops "fresh" out of the package and got 450 shots. The date code on them they had been sitting for 9 months.

I would try the camera stored with decent batteries in and see if they work. Even though you may not care about the date/time now you may years later, not just the ugly yellow numbers they make to mimic crappy film but the pictures themselves have the date and time (as well as a lot of other info) stored in data fields on them. I was given pictures of mine from when I was young and my parents can't remember which year they were taken even.