Welcome aboard! If you want to make a traditional side scroller, like mario, Id suggest using a sprite as the background. Make an image in any paint program, then save it as a bmp. or whatever, then load it into dark basic, and make a sprite with it. Do the same with your characters.
2d Games are really cool if you can get the going right. They require a lot of artistic skills. It is possible to lock the screen until all the enemies are defeated- but that will come along later. So your answer is, for the background and most other things in 2d games, use sprites. They look way better than the paste image command, and its really easy to layer them on top of eachother.
RPGamer
