Hi,
I got Pico8 today, I've just started toying around with it briefly and I'm having fun exploring other people's games and reading the forum. Incredible software!

One thing that I've noticed is that there are already various projects stuck because they hit the token limit (eg Underworld Siege or Kingslayer). Now, as a very young console not yet out of the alpha phase, I believe that no one has spent months on a single game and that a lot of things are still to be discovered and boundaries are to be pushed. Yet people hitting the (arbitrary) token limit is not very promising. For example, one of the two games quoted above is a LudumDare game. If someone can reach this limit in a one-week game competition, how can a project grow to a polished, full-featured game? I'm scared that this would prevent some kind of games (RPGs or adventures, for example) to be developed for Pic8, effectively making it less flexible that it could be.

It's not just the code. I figure most people here are more about code then audio, so the token limit comes up more often, but I'm about to hit the pattern + sequence limit in the matter of a single song. It's cool though, less is more.

I love the low token limit because it's teaching me optimization tricks that I wasn't aware of before. Of course, the token implementation can be cheesed, but it's still great for bad coders like me who don't know how to KISS

@pistacchio DOn't worry too much about the token limitation at the beginning, you will see that's a ton of stuff can be done with this limitation.
I find pico 8 perfect for Game jam, the hard limitation push you to think the game design in a different way.
I have been using it for Ludum Dare , and the result was great.(passengers ludum dare

I dunno. I sort of feel like the weird limits is what makes Pico-8 interesting. If you really want a more powerful "system", there are plenty of guides on how do homebrew NES development nowadays. Or Löve2D, Unity or (insert here).

I don't suspect it was ever meant to be flexible. Just an interesting set of arbitrary limitations. ; )