Which Language to Choose?

Hey guys, I haven't programmed in a while now and I'd like to get back into it. I've used VB6 at school for a year and then C on my own for a month or two. So what I mostly want to do is program for fun, both visual and software kind of things. I'd like to start more with gaming programming to eventually move on to (when i get more advanced) things that can interact with the OS, etc more core programming. So which is best for this?

bonus: I don't mind how hard the language is to learn.

Jeez, thanks for the help guys. I wonder why I expected that you guys would be nice. And don't tell me that you guys want to talk about programming here yadda yadda, this post has more content than most of the shit I saw out there.

real assholes.