Can anyone recommend a language for making a parody/remake of the original Oregon Trail?

Question

My brother and I have been playing the original Oregon Trail on an Apple II emulator, it's so fun. We want to make a clone of it that is sort of a parody but still the same concept and similar engine, we also want to maintain the classic retro charm by using a very similar resolution and the same style of low color bitmap graphics (example from game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBOLN7I8omY).

My question is what's the easiest or recommended language to achieve this? Should we use C, is it hard to do bitmap graphics like this in C? I know I used to make games as a kid with QBasic and I would do graphics using some bitmap method via an array of strings if I recall correctly it was something like this:

(can't remember variable syntax) = "00,01,00,01,00,04,00"
(can't remember variable syntax) = "00,01,00,01,00,04,00"
(can't remember variable syntax) = "00,01,00,01,00,04,00"

where each two digit number is a pixel, colored based on the number...

Anyways I think I've provided enough info here, recommend away :)

EDIT: I'm most familiar with the syntax style of C# at this point in my career.

Answer 1

Try Processing. You can define largish cubes as your pixels, and do some fancier UI tricks to make those old games a bit more playable, all without having to kill yourself on the graphics part (which is supposed to be Processing's main selling point).