Bit harsh, Ralf.
White Lightning was Forth based, and from what I recall it did funky things (presumably with interrupts) to get all sorts of nice concurrent sprite effects. It had sprite designer and sound designer software, plus some game design stuff too.
I never saw Laser BASIC, but the review in Crash (http://www.crashonline.org.uk/25/basics.htm) says "You can do all sorts of tricks if you can remember the right command — moving, scrolling, panning, recolouring, masking, rotating, animating, enlarging, shrinking, inverting and detecting collisions — in other words, you can fiddle about with patterns on the screen in almost every conceivable way."
If you're after a genuine retro games creation experience I'd say these sorts of packages bring quite a bit to the table.