Of course, ZC wins with great advantage here. Half-yer ago ZC was on par with Lunar Magic (ZC was more user-friendly while Lunar Magic together with good accessories like AddMusic, BlockTool and SpriteTool allows greater creativity with game designing). But once ZC 2.5 has been released at 21/12/2012, ZC gains major advantage with Item & Enemy Editors which allows quest makers to adapt item`s and enemies` properties to quest needs, Sidevew Gravity which allows sidescroller areas in quests (even entire sidescroller quests) and SCRIPTING. Just say: Scripting does magic!
But such triumph will not last long...
Game Maker is an user-friendly game creation program that originally has allowed to develop simple games like arkanoids, Pac-Man clones etc. But it eventually has evolved into a full-fldged IDE that allows serious game development (remember Mushroom Kingdom Fusion). It has several major dowsides:
1. It`s not free. Lite version is severly crippled and basically not useable for major game development projects while PRO version costs a lot of money.
2. Games created with Game Maker tend to suffer a lot of lag and slowdown on old PC`s like mine. This is because games used interpreted programming language which is not suitable for such demanding applications like games.
And we have another monster of game developing. His name is ENIGMA (Extensible Non-Interpreted Game Maker Augmentation). Its basically Game Maker on steroids. Altough ENIGMA itself is a plugin to a freeware Game maker-like IDE
(like LateralGM) it can parse any project into a C++ language followed by compilation. This allows games to run fast even on ancient PC`s!! And further more, it`s freeware and open-source!! Plus compatibility with GM projects for a kick start!
The only saving grace is the only one fact: Enigma is currently under construction. And It may take very long for such a wonder to be finished. But once ENIGMA is completed and proven to be bug-free...
Here is the site: http://enigma-dev.org