Heads up! The following “GameSir Pocket Taco” Mobile Controller was sent by the manufacturer for review purposes.
A Pocket Taco. A “Pocket Taco”. When I got the email regarding GameSir’s newest little vertical-style retro mobile controller, it took me a few moments for that mouthful to roll off the tongue. Not that it’s an offensive name, it’s just a bit… I wasn’t expecting it, at the very least. Usually the names these controllers get are a few consonants and a string of numbers. Or maybe I just find the idea of a controller donning the name of food to be amusing. Either way, it’s a fitting name for a controller whose sole purpose is to make playable the emulators and other retro games on mobile devices proper. Because it’s one thing to play a game that was inherently built for touch with your big thumbs but it’s another to play a Gameboy game (designed wholly for physical buttons mind) on a separate portion of your screen with no physical feedback to follow on.
It’s unfathomable to me. And it’s not like I’ve not tried it—I’ve been using emulators on mobile devices since the Windows Phone. But it’s just too frustrating for me to use touch for any sort of platformer and especially when urgency or pixel-perfect jumps are required. That’s why I bring around my GameSir G8+ around when I’m out for long periods of time, but this Pocket Taco is quite nifty and I might just leave the former behind when I go out. It’d encourage me to play less gacha games, too.
The Pocket Taco is a tiny little gadget. Far smaller than any of the controllers I have on hand, which is to be expected for something that (I assume) is suppose to mirror the form factor of a Gameboy Advance SP albeit with the expanded control scheme of a New Nintendo 3DS (no circle pads, of course). This things got four face buttons, a direction pad, and two pair of bumpers along with a home and mode button. You can connect this thing to PCs, mobile devices, and even the Nintendo Switch if you so desire as it borrows similar connection functionality from the other GameSir controllers. By the way, that does mean you can use the Pocket Taco without docking in a screen in-between, but I don’t really know if I’d do that considering the form factor, but I’m not going to complain about expansive software support.
Speaking of which, I have to emphasise how little this thing is. It is virtually weightless (terrible for tossing at fascists) and the only way I can comfortably use it is when I have my phone sandwiched in-between. I generally prefer a bit of heft with my controllers and alone, I can’t quite say I’m a fan of the Pocket Taco as a standalone unit. So thankfully, when you do have something solid within the Pocket Taco, it because much more comfortable to hold. My phone helps me position my fingers around the bumpers and once you remember how to squish your hands to the shape of the unit, playing games is a breeze. Your device will be held together by two layers of rubber which keeps a surprisingly tight grip on the phone. I wouldn’t try knocking or shaking the Taco, but I never felt like my phone was in danger of slipping out of my hands.
The buttons are as responsive as you’d expect a GameSir controller to be. I find the directional pad to be much more… Mushy than I expected. Granted, I don’t have a Gameboy on hand any longer to mess around with the d-pad there, but I do still keep my Nintendo DS around! And that thing has tactile feedback which I’m very fond of. Mind, this doesn’t make the d-pad any less useful, but there’s a reason why I prefer my Xbox Series and 8BitDo controllers for platformers. It helps me lead my fingers for certain trick jumps I may have to and all-in-all helps movement feel satisfying.
Still, I took the Taco for a test over the weekend with two games and had loads of fun: ‘Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow’ and ‘Crash Bandicoot The Big Adventure’. My goodness, is it nice to play games that aren’t time vampires for a change…
The Pocket Taco gave me no trouble as I set it up within RetroArch on my Galaxy S25 Ultra. It was immediately detected and after a moment of button set up, I was ready to go. The RetroArch application allows me to use the mGBA core on Android, which is one of the best Gameboy Advance emulators around—no BIOS needed, you just need to dump your games and slot them somewhere on your phone (if you’ve an R4 card and an older DS Lite around, it’s the best way to get your games all ready to go! But I do intend on building a small guide on how all this works if you ever find yourself needing to go back to the past).
Games run great off this core and will work for the vast majority of the Gameboy library. I spent ample time mucking about in Crash and Castlevania and having a good time doing so. The former takes most of its ideas from ‘Crash Bandicoot Warped’ with some influence from the second game, but it does a good job of replicating the original series’ mechanics in a 2D environment. The latter is what I’ve been told to be an INTI-ish developed title, bringing a fun Classicvania style of gameplay to portable devices. It’s a lot of fun, shockingly so! Usually I tend to enjoy every “-vania” that isn’t Metroid or Castlevania, but this one starts off strong and doesn’t feel helplessly clunky. I look forward to playing this one over the course of the month.
GameSir’s controller tanked these games with absolutely no issues, even as I was pulling off some of Crash’s finer moves or threading the needles in Aria. I’d have to compare the exact movement feel to a real Gameboy or my DS at some point, but the Pocket Taco does exactly as advertised and quite comfortably so, even as it dons the Advance SP form factor. Now I did have on notable gripe: the charging port hole on the bottom is too small. The Taco has a little convenience where you can slot a charging cable into your phone thru the bottom. Very nifty for a long play session!
But the standard Samsung USB-C cable won’t fit in there and the smallest cable I’ve found just barely made it in and pulling it out left me mildly concerned for my phone’s safety. This seems to be a common occurrence with controllers (and I partly put the blame on cable manufacturers insisting on massive cable heads) but I’d appreciate if future variations of the Pocket Taco had a larger clearance for these cable openings.
A full review of this thing will come down the line! But in the meantime, you can pre-purchase your own GameSir Pocket Taco via the Kickstarter that’s still live and over at GameSir’s website—running at 35 dollarbucks.
