What language should I learn if I want to create a 2D platform game very similar to Donkey Kong Country? It needs to have a few layers of images and sprites and thats about all that is required graphically. I know JavaScript and Visual Basic so I am after a language that shouldnt be too much of a transition from these. Any suggestions?

I don't really have a great answer for your question, but what kinda stuff are you running into in VB that's holding you back in this area? It sounds like you might want to pop open the Visual Studio installer, since you have that already and plop in the J# and C# pieces, and play around with those. It would be an easy transition since you already (presumably) know the interface and the namespace pretty well.

If you wanted to use C, then a very nice abstraction layer for this type of thing is SDL (http://www.sdl.org); it has quite a few pieces of documentation for sprite-based games and animations.

VB should work just fine for what you want I am sure.

The one thing that I'd say about VB is that it isn't brilliant with sprites and the like. You can be fairly sure that if you're trying anything but simple animation with a few objects, things can get really slow really quickly.

I was thinking VB would not handle the animating images well because I had tried it already and it was a bit flickery, but now I discovered the PictureClip control which I seem to be able to animate hundreds of images quickly without flickering or delay, in which case VB will be good enough. Only problem is that PictureClip does not support gifs with transparency, is there a different way to use sprites with Visual Basic?