I personally think it doesn't really matter how a game is made really, it's what is made that counts. But again everyone is entitled to their opinions.

As for the 82 community, the late '90s were indeed great in terms of program releases. Activity dropped around 2001 to pick up again late 2002, but most programs released, especially in BASIC, were low quality. By 2003 some cooler things started to come out, such as FFTOM2, grayscale package for 83+, Fire Track 2 and 2004 had Desolate, The Verdante Forest and many good BASIC games, but it was not as high as it is in 2009. 2004 knew a calc craze because the 84 came out, but with the lack of new innovative stuff, people seemed to think everything was done so by 2006, activity started to drop on 82-84 forums. There were lot of cool BASIC projects but none would get finished. Early 2007 until Late 2008 were nearly dead in terms of programming and even many forums that once got 100 posts a day would get around 10-20 a week. 2009 saw lot of innovative projects and releases and it's just starting to pick up again.
 
The 82 community also had its shares of flame wars but it was never as bad as TI-Files vs Ticalc and the like. We had SiCoDe breaking up in 2001, then in 2004 we had Drubu breaking up with old staff flaming each others on MaxCoderz forums (that lasted half a year). In 2004 a rivalry between UTI and MaxCoderz arisen, because both were the two big forums with opposite views in general, so there were often flame wars between each communities on both sides. That cooled down after admins started giving warnings by mid 2005. Then came #tcpa vs Omnimaga, altough not in the form of flame wars. Some #tcpa users simply got banned for trolling here and then started a libel/slander campaing against us, trying to brainwash the entire community. It lasted 2 years and eventually it came to the point where almost our entire staff turned against us and the anon raids came along, so we went dormant until things calms down.

Things are pretty fine now except maybe certain forums no longer being welcoming toward newbies. The result is several people migrating over here while the rest stays there.

IMHO, because it's the internet and because some people are more narrow-minded than others, the TI community could never unite completly. In fact, in the past, many people suggested us to merge with UTI, MaxCoderz, Revsoft and probably Cemetech, but merging all sites together would lead to TI community suicide.

Either ticalc.org needs a complete overhaul of their site to get into this century. (forums, user submitted news, editorials, a better review system. Teamspeak/Ventrilo, ETC) or someone else has to step up to take the void. the only big URL left is calc.org, and it's dead regardless of what the placeholder says. I really wish Adam Berlinsky-Schine would take the site over again and start over with a new team. it's still his domain.

Ticalc.org has needed an overhaul for years, and I'm sure it's been discussed before. It just seems no one has the time or intrest in doing it.

Is anyone still coding in 68k BASIC?

I picked it up recently, as well.

I write math programs on the 89, because I prefer writing math programs myself.

I have made a few utilities- a timer (to play around with the time functions in 68k Basic, not because I needed one), and a custom toolbar for my z89 IDE project.

I'm not really a game programmer (unlike everyone else on Omnimaga), but I would probably make games in C instead if I was interested in making one for the 89.

I didn't because when I got my 89, there was a strong hate against BASIC programmers in the 68K community from most people (they all told us to use TIGCC or ASM), then I kinda got back to TI-BASIC. There was also the fact I don't like the 89 keypad due to some letters not being ordered alphabetically. I tried writing a BASIC program on the 89 once and it took me 3 minutes to type a sentence, because I have been used so much to the 83+ keypad layout (I wish someone made an app that re-map the ALPHA keys to a layout similar to the 83+.)

That said I think you can do pretty great stuff in 68K basic and if you don't want to code in C it can be a pretty good language to make certain type of games. I tried some in the past and they were quite good.

Btw, there's also another language for 68K now called NewProg, I wonder if it's any good?

Welcome here, btw. Glad to see new 68K users around. Since a lot of people here program for the 83+ and TI-Nspire, it can be hard to attract 68K users. The thing is that some of us, while not developing for 68K calcs, have actual 68k models, so they might be interested in playing games for them. Also, since the 68K scene is still dwindling, unlike the z80/TI-Nspire scenes, there are fewer of those programmers around

One way around the key layout is to use a TI-Keyboard. It can also help if you have a bunch of text for a 83+/84+ program.

I think Flib lets you use the entire screen, but you still cannot display some stuff like text on the part of the screen that would be a menu otherwise.