Pocket8

This emulator works great with the GameSir Pocket Taco. Screen position matches up nicely and it makes my phone feel like a little Pico-8 Game Boy, which I love! However, I ran into several issues/complaints with this app. First, and probably the largest, it doesn’t run my favorite Pico-8 game, the brilliant dev Krystman’s Mai-chan’s Sweet Buns. The PNG is even shown on this app’s screenshots, but it won’t play. It opens and says to play on Krystman’s Itch.io page. Very disappointing and as that was the very first game I tried, it does not bode well for overall cart compatibility, as I almost always can get that game to run, no matter the emulator. Second, the Pocket Taco will work during the game, but doesn’t work in the app’s menus, so you can’t use it to select which game you want to play—you’ll need to do everything via touchscreen. It would be nice to be able to use a controller to navigate everything within the app. Also, once you’ve opened the app’s menus using the Select button, say, to save (which you need to do via touchscreen, again), when you go back into the game, the controller no longer works and you need to exit the game for it to work again. And finally, not necessarily a negative and a small thing, but something I saw that I like in the other Pico-8 emulator in the App Store is the ability to add a pixel grid overlay to the game. I think it would really add to the Game Boy feel when paired with the Pocket Taco. Still, I think this emulator is great, especially considering it’s free!

For me, I'll be sticking with the browser for now, as it works well for me and it's not often that I want to play PICO-8 games offline. That said, I think it's invaluable to have the fantasy console represented on the apple app store. The only way I'd see myself using this instead of the browser with the lexaloffle website/bbs is if this was integrated with the bbs itself (allowing online cart surfing, playing, staring, and maybe even commenting), which I doubt will happen anytime soon.

This emulator ran and allowed me to instantly enjoy Golf Sunday without issue, whereas a certain other popular Pico-8 emulator did not. So that instantly makes this the emulator of choice for me, and hopefully it fares as well with other games! 4 stars for now because while an emulator doesn’t need a bunch of filler features, there’s certainly always room to improve — case in point, I’d love to be able to easily import my existing folder of games like the other app lets me do, but for some reason this app only lets me import one at a time and (even worse) makes a duplicate copy in its localized folder on my device.