Game Maker is excellent for beginners, and is free to make games with, and costs $20 to register for extra features. It's what I use and it works great! It has a Drag and Drop mode where you can make games with no programming knowledge, and a coding mode for more advanced users called GML. Worth taking a look at, as it's VERY easy to use, and there's a lot of support for it:

http://www.yoyogames.com/

You would use XNA if you want to develop a game for the XBox and be able to distribute it through the XBox live network. However, for standard pc game you would use the directx api for it. If you are a newbie or just dont feel like dealing with the window handling and creation, use the DXUT library included in the api because it does all the callbacks for you.

I got XNA, but I couldn't figure it out, I've been too busy to learn C++ lately, so I use GML... Maybe C++ is something that would be good to learn over the summer.

I never liked a game creator, most of the times you will have problems because you can do what you want. You can't make a Zelda-like game in RPG Maker... I recomend just learn how to do programing for games =]

Game Maker works for all games, I've made shooters, platformers, RPGs, etc. It's commonly thought that Game Maker games are unprofessional, but if you can get really good at it you can make some really fancy stuff with it! http://www.reflectgames.com/ has some really polished and professional online Game Maker games, as a matter of fact, you wouldn't even notice they were made in it if no one told you! My favorite one there is Aces High Over Verlor Island.

EDIT: Oh, thought I'd mention it's not MY site, I'm just giving an example, I realized I never said that in the post.

This post has been edited by Absolute Zer0: Mar 28 2008, 07:46 PM

Game Maker is very good and easy to use.

Yet, for professionals, its momentarily boring :\

I never personally liked game makers... I've been programming my own games for 12 years now... Not that I made anything good, and earned money, but then again, I never intended to... I started with simple text-based adventures on Commodore 64, then moved in to sprite graphics, also on C64... Then moved to PC... The rest is history... Most of the good games I made are gone now, obsolete, or destroyed, and I don't intend to make them again... I saw I can, so there's no thrill in making it again...

As Alex said, best would be to learn programming, then learn how to use OpenGL, or DirectX API (I would recommend OpenGL), and off you go... Start with simple games, like mines, tetris, side-view shooters and alike, and then move on to a more complex games, like isometric-view space strategies, or FPS... It's not as hard as it looks

If your wanting to make a game but dont want to do too much programing theres always Reality Factory.

Heres the Link

Reality Factory

I really like this game creation swuit and its absolutly free.