Gamemaker

Big flurry of posts coming :D

First up.

http://www.gamemaker.nl

This is what Kilk and Play should have been all these years ago lol. This is extremely powerful, drag and drop, events, behaviours, simple callbacks. Looks like you can make just about any kind of 2D game you want although I haven't seen much about being able to define animation cycles.

It can even do Doom-like and isometric games, platformers and scrollers are extremely easy with this