Well it depends what you mean by text-based games.

-For some people, text-based game means that the game only has sentences and/or menus and the user have to imagine himself how the area where he's in looks like. These kind of games are kinda like when reading a book or playing an old DOS-based MUD game. Basically, the game shows no minimum of graphics (even ASCII-art) so you won't see your character walking around on a map or entering buildings.

-For other people (the minority), text-based game will refer to everything using ASCII characters (letters, numbers and symbols) as tiles/sprites for dungeon layout and battle animations, not just menu-based games as described above.

IMHO, the second definition is not valid, because text-based should refer to something that just use words and sentence to describe where you are or menu choices when you want to go somewhere. game such as Illusiat 6 through 13 (except 10) would be more ASCII games, ASCII-based games or ASCII-art-based games rather than text-based

That said, I tend to not really play text-based games per the first definition because I tend to prefer to have a certain minimum of graphics representing the dungeons or battles when playing, even if they're just ASCII characters and lines. Idk, I just kinda prefer to be able to walk around rather than just select menu choices like in old dungeon and dragon books. There are some quite good text-based BASIC games, though, such as TI-City (altough it isn't finished) and Potter Quest 1.

results are better than I was expecting =D

EDIT: I was working a whole day today on a new text-based game called "Dr. Ausrotts Castle" (in pure basic 'of course')
The starting image only already costed me maybe 2 hours to make in total.
But once again, I almost started crying and pulling my hair (and I have pretty long hair) out of my head
becouse I accidentially ran the GB emulator, wanted to exit it, pressed 'ON' and cleared my calc XO
Gee, sometimes, life is really hard

You're lucky - at least the Gb emulator can be run on your calc - I'm stuck with my 83+.

Actually, it doesn't really run on mah 84+ yet, Tetris is sound only and rest = nothing but scrambled graphics

They can be good, but it really depends on the author.  Many games nowadays (I'm not just talking about calculator games) have nothing except incredible graphics; good story lines and game play have gone out the window.  Obviously, with text-based games there's no way game play will be sacrificed for graphics.

I agree with Simplethinker. In calc games, in my case, my first graphical games often sacrified gameplay and content to keep up with the RAM limitations (back then, XCOPY, ZCOPY, xLIB real(10 function and Resource didn't exist. Flash Gordon was rather limited), but of course I was also experimenting. But take for example The Reign of Legends 3, the game that started up xLIB project, according to what tr1p1ea said back when he started it. From ROL2 to 3, I went from ASCII to graphics, but to do that, I had to sacrify considerable amount of speed and cut down hours of gameplay and features. Map loading was slow, walking around as well and battles were slower paced too. Certain other loading times were reduced, though. ROL2 was 25 hours long. ROL3 was 15. ROL2 had 9 playable characters switchable between battles in the airship. ROL3 only had 3. Some config menu options disappeared as well, altough new ones were added. The only thing ROL3 had over ROL2 in general was the better graphics, fewer garbage collections, travelling in time like in Chrono Trigger, much smaller save files (compression) and better english version (ROL2 was my first RPG of that lenght to be translated, while ROL3 started directly as an english game)

In Reuben Quest case, games were rather short and battle system was too simple and repetitive

Transformers isn't about plot it's about giant over sized mechanical robots beat each other up duhh.