Thats the problem, the intellistar 2 is full of animations, which would be difficult to recreate in Visual Basic
Nonsense. If you insist on using .NET based languages, then shoot for development under C# and XNA.
If you're like me and dislike proprietary programming languages and unsupported frameworks (XNA is no longer supported or developed by Microsoft), you could develop under Mono and Unity. The nice thing is Mono is essentially the same thing, but while programming with Mono you can port the program to OS X, Linux, and even Android if you really wanted to. This would be the route to go in my opinion.
Always have to remember this... It's not the programming language that caps your possibilities... it's the programmer (not to say that .NET is generally an awful language to do this stuff with due to lack of object/image manipulation, because .NET is seriously awful for graphic intensive applications.).