I'm wondering if anyone else ever heard of this thing called GameBrix. It's a site set up for people to be able to easily make fun Flash games. I even caught it in the beta stage and got a free trial and its really powerful, but I don't know what happened to it, because nothing has happened there since. I was even making progress on an ORIGINAL game, sort of a Boulderdash clone, without using their silly templates!
http://www.gamebrix.com/