Quote: "Maybe I'm forgetting something, but why using sprites that slow down everything when you could simply paste images on the screen?"
Have you tried it? You pretty much have to redraw the background for every frame. Then you have to deal with the position, angle, transparency issues of the image you're going to paste and other things that take up processing time. Essentially having a sprite with associated functions to do this for you saves the programmer a lot of hassle. Yes, there's some overhead for keeping track of everything and determining whether a sprite can be printed. If that doesn't work for you then, yes, use your own methods.
Lilith, Night Butterfly
I'm not a programmer but I play one in the office