Ok, here it goes, a whole bunch of stuff:

For a basic bame, this is the best ive seen. Unfortunately, all ive seen is bad. Nibbles is a lightning fast game. Its only fun on the F3 or F4 speed, and skill is not needed for a slow game with lousy reactions.

A good way to make this better is a way i hae used on a few programs. Just make a little asm module that reads a ketstroke and saves it to x. A well written asm keypress scanner can read and save the keypress faster than the basic GetKy can be interpreted, let alone executed.

A larger screen would make a better looking game, but will slow it down more.

TI programming is just like the computer industry. Users will go for the best, or what is presented as the best. To make viable products, any group has to equal or excell its comptitors. And Nibbles Arcade has a few d*** good competitors.

This is (i hate to say it) a great improvement in basic gameing, but it still is not a great program that will make me delte that 1.2k superfast asm nibbles. The only way to make truely good (but still not great) basic games is to make the time consuming routies (key presses, and some graphics) in asm. I admit that even the games and programs i have made in this way are not all that great, and even the high bar for this programing style will not be able to match the products of the great asm programmers.

Its all about competition. Sorry, but even the absulute pinnacle of basic games cannot match the middle and uppper range of asm (although i will say that a poorly written asm game is not better than a good basic game. I tried to clone tetris, and it sucked bad. A basic version is better, but cannot compete with Ztetris.)

Now (this will surely spark another flame war)
Basmic does not have to match asm to meet its goal. To my understanding, Basmic wishes to portray basic as equally viable as asm. This is completely true. Basic is great for math, and expanding the functionality of the calculators (not as good as a well written asap, but still pretty good for on the fly upgrades i make during ap calc tests.) Basic is as viable as C or asm or java or any other language. The fault of basic lies in its very nature. TI-Basic is modified to make it balanced for math. This weakens it as a gaming language, and weakens it for any other application. Assembly is totally unbalanced. Anything the Z80 in the gameboy can do (except color and within memory/clock speed limits) the Z80 in a TI-86 or 83 or one of those old minicomputers from the early 80's can do. V-Basic or Qbasic are actually pretty good for games, but TI uses its own basic, which isnt.

Ok, so below will soon start the spam war.
HAPPY FLAMING!

Jeff Barrett