Come with me down memory lane. Remember Soda Play’s Constructor? That nifty springs-and-sprockets creature-machine builder from a few years ago, that made you 100 times more excited than Meccano (I did warn you about memory lane), but ultimately crushed you with the revelation of your own ineptitude, impatience and lack of creativity? Well, Soda Play are back, only now instead of creature-machines, you can make games.

Newtoon is a Java tool which lets you make little 2D physics-based games entirely out of balls and springs. You can fix balls to the play-field or leave them to bounce free, and springs can be adjusted for tension. This being Soda Play, you can tweak things like gravity and friction. So far, so familiar, right? But the game bit comes in through some devilishly simple grammar. Each ball can, if you so chose, be designated a goal, hazard, or player token. The token can be controlled by the arrow keys: touch a hazard and it’s game over, touch the goal and it’s a win. And suddenly, all of 90 seconds later, you’ve made your first game.

I’ve done my time with idiot-proof game creators - with RPG Maker, and Dark Basic and various modding tools, but am usually defeated by the same failings that Meccano used to reveal. With Newtoon, it will take an actual act of an actual god to prevent you from making a game. It’s the Wario Ware of game-makers, something you really can play with for 2 minutes and find rewarding.

And, actually, it really is the Wario Ware of game-makers, as you can collect your own and other creators’ mini-games into ’stacks’ which will remind you very much of that very game. Much in the manner of Constructor all your games can be saved to Soda Play’s website. I also seem to remember something in the beta about being able to download game stacks to play on your mobile phone, but no sign of that at present.

Basically, if you’ve got an hour to kill between now and lunch, you can use Newtoon to become an experienced game-maker. Just think how much more authority your forum posts will have when you can preface them with ‘In the games that I’ve made…’! Or, if you’re already an experienced game-maker, just think how gratifying it will be watching your friends, family and foes discover that it isn’t as easy as it looks, even when it looks this easy.

And, if that’s given you the taste for drawing things in 2D and watching physics happen to them, then I’d recommend spending the afternoon playing Crayon Physics. And then writing mass petitions to Nintendo to get it a DS deal.