Well, after playing with Game Maker a bit on windows machines, I found that it's rather fun to play around with at times. However, there is a problem: there is no version of Game Maker for Linux or Mac, both of which I have on my laptop. So I set out to find an answer. My first instinct was to try to run Game Maker with WINE (Windows Emulator). So, I downloaded Game Maker 7 onto my laptop, onto Ubuntu Linux. I opened the installer with WINE, and it seemed to install all right. However, there was a problem: when I tried to run my game, it worked fine, except for some reason or another, most of the game was covered with a large black box. Everything else worked perfectly, except for that black box. There is little to no support for things as specific as: "Game Maker running through WINE on Ubuntu Linux 8.04". I searched a bit, and found a few forum entries. Basically, Game Maker just WONT run on Ubuntu Linux. However, Ubuntu only accounts for half my computer-I've got Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.x) on the other partition of my harddrive. So, I rebooted and selected OS X as my operating system (thanks to the folks at rEFIt). I thought for a minute or two, then decided to try running it under the Mac version of WINE, DarWINE. In this case, it simply refused to open. After a bit of searching, however, I found that there should be a Mac version of Game Maker coming out very soon. Just have to wait and see.