Thanks to the TI-83+ & 84+ TI-BASIC RPG Nostalgia video series as well as some other calculator videos on Youtube, two of our old calculator RPG series, Reuben Quest and The Reign Of Legends, have made the headlines on the popular video game website Games Radar, to make it on a technology blog Makezine right afterward, then Digg upcoming section. This caused the Reuben Quest: The Lost Mirror video to jump by 6000 views in one day and 2000 views for The Reign Of Legends 3, both still counting.

In addition to Reuben Quest 2, which came in 4th place in their Best TI-83+ RPGs list, and ROL3, which came in 2nd place, the old Drug War text classic came 5th, Dying Eyes came 3rd (altough the news article is a bit misleading by saying there are french and english versions avaliable for download, as the french version is not even out yet) and the great winner was tr1p1ea's Desolate. Here are the links to the 3 articles:

Games Radar: http://www.gamesradar.com/f/the-best-ti-83-rpgs-ever/a-2009081394313543031
Makezine: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/the_best_ti-83_rpgs_ever.html
Digg upcoming section: http://digg.com/gaming_news/The_best_TI_83_RPGs_ever

The Reign Of Legends series was created during the first half of 2003 and the first half of 2004 and Reuben Quest series came out in December 2004 and January 2005.

The ROL series features approximately 20 hours of gameplay per game, with 3 vs 3 battles like in most console RPGs and lot of features. In ROL3, the game starts in a far future where 3 warriors are failing their duty to prevent the extinction of human race. About 300 years later, a mysterious mage decides to return in the past, before humanity was nearly exterminated, to change the course of history. In 2200 AD, before the warriors are even aware that Earth is in danger, the mage guides them to the power of magic, which they didn't have in their future to save the world. This game features time travelling like in Chrono Trigger for the Super Nintendo.

In Reuben Quest series, Ev, an evil creature that was once defeated in the past, is once again threatening the island where Reuben is now living. In the second game of the series, after Reuben thought he defeated him, a mysterious mirror appears on another land to the south, which apparently leads to a soon apocalyptic future, where Ev is now hiding. The first game of the series was the first grayscale RPG ever written in BASIC (with the help of ASM libs) and the second TI-83+ grayscale game ever made.

Back in 2005, xLIB xLIB Revolution was featured on Engadget and made front page on dozens of other blogs, mostly japaneese ones.

Yeah I think this is because these sites tend to not check calc-only sites. Notice how this news mostly features Youtube videos (these vids were added mostly last year and this year). Still cool, tho. Anything like that is good for the community too, as it could make a bit more people interested into getting a calc or starting programming for a while.

Yeah, once I finished the Nostalgia series I might actually do the ASM ones. The BASIC nostalgia series was mainly to show what can be done without using pure ASM or xLIB/CelticIII as libs. There are some ASM games on Youtube alerady, but very few RPGs, which is probably why they went unnoticed (since the news was about RPGs)

I personally don't judge games based on the language used, though, as they can still be fun to play. Plus, I am not too fond of the idea of Omnimaga getting invaded by ASM programmers simply because most that I met are not the kind of personalities I would like to have around Omnimaga. Also, BASIC programmers don't mix well with ASM programmers due to fanboyism (mostly coming from ASM programmers). There are a few exceptions, but I got a lot of trouble with most ASM coders (many of them that would have ended up being banned permanently from the site if they posted like they did elsewhere sometimes)

Congrats on getting the recognition kevin.

This is fucking awesome.

I know this is a bit of a necropost, but I came across this last night (while wandering the interwebs) and it brought a smile to my lips! Congrats to Kevin and Tr1plea! =) This also proves that their are females on the internets, and that they play games on their graphing calculators (as it was a woman who wrote the article.)

You're welcome. Hmmm... I'm fairly sure that game was on ticalc in the past. I seem to remember seeing in their archives back in the day, and I remember back in high school alot of kids had it on their calcs.

Yea, ticalc's archive were pretty lax back in the day (as were the other popular sites). It's funny though. You'd think a company like Texas Instruments would thoroughly check out any content they were endorsing before releasing it with a product. In regards to copyright issues most companies don't seem to care about fan projects overall (it depends on the quality, content, method of distribution ect.) much less on such a limited system.