i Would start of with basic as it is simle to use.

That is not quite true. Lots of people still use C/C++. Yes, most of the "professional" grade engines and APIs (network, physics, sound, graphics, etc.) still done in C/C++. There are plenty of indie level stuff going on with C/C++ and the open source world. In fact, most of the open source APIs (OGRE being one, Torque Network Library another, OpenAL, ODE, etc.) are all done in C/C++. There are some Java and C# (and other languages) wrappers. That is not likely to change any time soon as its its about as close as you are going to get to machine code with a high-level language.

That being said, its really dependent on your game. There are plenty of other choices (C#, Java) that can be used quite comfortably depending on your game choice. I know GarageGames is working on a game engine similar to their high-end Torque product using the XNA framework (it's called TorqueX), and for Java there are several graphics engines (jMonkey) comes to mind. Outside of graphical games, you could use Java (via JEE or even just JSP), PHP, ASP.NET (or hopefully soon the MVC for ASP.NET instead of the brain dead WebForms), to do web style games. Or there is Silverlight or Flash for more interactive "fun" (whatever that may be... I just generally call them "annoying") games.

And speaking of "hacks", heck building mods in some of the high-end FPS games (Unreal, HalfLife, Cyrsis, etc) can be a "fun" way of learning to program in maybe a more "exciting" venue... depends on your perspective of course.

Quote from Dygear :

The Pros use C++, some still use C, but thats due to the core of the game starting out in that, in around 1995. Only people just starting to learn how to program, and in fact also, how to hack games (Like Wall Hacks) use C# and I've even seem people learn how to program, from making wall hacks. It's insane how easy it is to do. (I've never done it myself tho . . . No really.)

If you want to fast-track into a working and playable game, DarkBasic is probably as good a place as anywhere to start. It's not low-level - it's almost WYSIWYG - but DarkBasic offers rapid returns on effort, and for someone who's never even programmed before, and who's interested in programming something that's graphically rich, this is bound to be invaluable. You can make some giant steps into programming very quickly. Later on you can start looking at the different things that go together to make something work even faster, or be more complex.

http://darkbasic.thegamecreators.com/

I've not tried DarkBasic, but I've been getting very heavily into Python for the last few weeks. It truly is a glorious language to work with, and I'd suggest Pygame as a nice game library for a programming beginner. Python is so lovely and compact, I think it would be relatively painless for a newcomer to learn. Plus, you know, all the tutorials involve printing Monty Python sketches to the screen, which is a nice change from the dryness of most references.

Quote from wheel4hummer :

*cough* Python *cough*

I work in C# and a mix of Interfaces and Generics gives most of what I need but there have been times I with C# had Duck Typing like Python