Technology that should make a comeback?

Hair in a can.




But seriously though - did you know you can re-grow your thinning hair? Mix 1pt shea butter 1pt sweet almond oil and put in some drops of the following essential oils: thyme, cedarwood and peppermint. Massage a small amount into your scalp every night and wash out in the morning. Then give your scalp a nice 5 minute massage when it's dry. You should start noticing stubble in a week or so.

I thought of some more the other day:

-payphones. Payphones should have never disappeared. I was without a phone for over a month recently because I discontinued by cell phone service, and I couldn't make any calls. It was absolute hell. Every town on Earth should have at least half-a-dozen payphones for the people to use.

Now, here are some gaming tech that I think absolutely MUST make a comeback:

-8 way joysticks. The Dreamcast, Gamecube, and Wii controllers all had them and they were AWESOME for arcade genres (i.e. shmups, run-n-gun games, fighting games, beat-em-ups, etc.). I love using my GC joystick to play Metal Slug, Melee, and Soul Calibur. 8-way joysticks are objectively superior for arcade games than the 360 degree sticks on Dualshock and Xbox controllers because they basically support 8-way movement by default. I don't care if that's all they're limited too, that all I care about because the arcade category of games is home to most of my favorite genres. As a competitive hardcore gamer, I love 8-way joysticks because they epitomize the sturdy simplicity that is required for playing these games to their full potential. BRING BACK 8-WAY JOYSTICKS!

-Actually good d-pads. Remember when d-pads used to be amazing in their design and build-quality? Remember the Mega Drive d-pads, the Saturn d-pads, the SNES d-pad, the gamecube d-pad, the N64 d-pad, etc? I remember those. I remember them because they were the absolute best of their kind. But then Sega died out, Nintendo cheaped out, and Sony and Microsoft came along and destroyed the public's image of the d-pad by screwing it up with bad ergonomics and then tacking on an atrocious "pressure sensitive" gimmick that makes playing arcade/competitive games frustratingly impossible. #MakeDpadsGreatAgain

-First party "turbo" controllers, or "deluxe" controllers as I like to call them, since they often offer more than just turbo fire. Famous examples include the NES Max and NES Advantage controllers:



I think I remember Sega making some controllers like these as well. There was an arcade-style stick I had for my Genesis, and I remember it having turbo fire. Mark even reviewed it. Usually, these kind of controllers were made by third party companies, often with disastrous results due to build quality issues, but way back in the day Nintendo and Sega made their own first party turbo controllers. I think Nintendo should still be making its own first party turbo controllers and I think Sony and Microsoft should be doing the same!! Bring these back!

-Cheating devices, i.e. Action Replay, Game Shark, Game Genie, etc. Modding the shit out of my N64 cart of Super Mario 64 and my copy of Super Mario Sunshine as a kid was just about the most fun I ever had with a console game. You could tweak the gravity, tweak the game physics, tweak just about EVERYTHING in these games with the use of cheating devices. You could even access the official debug menus with these things. They weren't just for cheating. They really were modding tools for consoles at their core. Not only that, but they often came packed with other features, too, like playing import games, import movies, and doing other cool or incredibly useful stuff. Unfortunately, thanks to whiney achievement-whores like Balder, who pride themselves over their shitty collection of worthless badges that nobody cares about, companies are afraid to make cheating devices for modern consoles because they would "spoil achievements" for everybody. What a sin. There is also the more legitimate issue of using cheating devices to cheat in online games, which was a big complaint Xbox gamers commonly had back during the era of the original Xbox. I think the problem was more the lack of moderation/official admins for those servers rather than the cheating devices themselves. It was very stupid for the console manufactures to demonize the cheating devices for online cheating instead of actually getting off their lazy asses and hiring some admins to moderate their online games.

Whatever this Mayan guy was piloting: