Several flavors of BASIC out there...EMC mentioned DarkBASIC already, I've messed around in TnT BASIC and found it quite comfortable. There's a few freeware/shareware things out there, mostly open-source (like the Marathon open source) -- which means a lot of struggling through patches and patchy documentation, which ain't fun for anyone. And then there's something called the Coldstone Game Engine, from Ambrosia, which was designed to let a beginner create a simple RPG. It has the benefit of simplicity -- with the inevitable downside of lack of flexibility. I messed around with that for a while, too -- it uses pre-rendered sprites, and it turned out Poser and Bryce made them easy to create.