Absolutely. But small 2D games are totally within reach.

Pacman or space invaders would not be interesting today like they were 30 years ago. You need design, music, smooth movement, multiple things happening at once... It would be a mess to do it in simple BASIC.

Are you sure a motivated eight year old would give up on programming entirely because he can't program an entire Pokemon game by himself in BASIC?

Truth. Which is why I think BASIC is a bad choice. But it can be easy with modern languages, and so that's why I think they're better.

But then you are distracting students with pretty pictures and music and not teaching them what, say, recursion is.