how much I love the smell of
bare memory-mapped registers compared to these bunch of libraries... One proper poke to memory and you're changing the location of your sprite, the background colour, the volume on channel 3, the scroll offset for the layer 2 and the zoom of layer 3 ...
remnants of my C64 years, I guess.
Oh, and of course, if you're serious about game development, you're very likely to have checked
Kirby Kid's Critical Gaming blog because you've understood that gameplay and level design are as valuable as your coding and graphics skills