Direct conversion may be Visual Basic. If you're looking to go further with your skills geared toward game development, you have 2 sides to look at. With experience in GM, using scripting in engines such as the Unreal engine may be a path to go or even flash(which is fun)... to go 'hardcore' down a real path, you can go my path which is used in today's game development world:
Basic -> C -> C++
Stopping to learn Java or C# is nice for fun and all, but chances are that you'll be required to know or be familiar with the above to some degree. It's definitely harder and won't produce glorious results off the bat like GM or XNA is and those are great in their respects, but in terms of real world applications and the time it takes to fully understand a language, you may want to jump into one of the 3 above languages.
Basic and C are both procedural; my bachelor's started of in a course of darkBasic for prototyping and what not. ASM/C is used for handhelds, and C++(which is object oriented) is used for handhelds/pc/console.
Although I've had a course in Assembler and have used it in GBA development, it plays a small role and even with setting up your own engine, chances are the only aspects where you'll need it, someone has already determined what you'll need and may be as simple as a copy and paste.