Thanks for all the info...I'll take it I can expect a Java program to run somewhere between 90% and 50% of the speed of C++, and I'll be sure to get the latest version of LWJGL when I'm ready to get started coding...I still have a fair bit to learn before I'll really be ready to take on coding my side-scroller, but it's good to hear I'll be able to write a game with little noticable slowdown outside of the attrocious loading time everything Java seems to have...I may actually be able to use what I'm learning, rather than just using it as a stepping-stone to C++.

Of course, it's possible the horrible loading times I'm getting is because Eclipse is so bloated...bloated with truly useful features, but still bloated...whatever the cause, it sometimes takes two minutes for one of my console programs to start running...once it runs, it finishes instantly, but it's a pain to wait two whole minutes while the VM loads.

That is a good article, in some ways...

But it gets me a bit how he emphasizes how much expectations for professional games have grown, and therefore that it's harder to code a game now than ever before.

Really, if you're not out to code a 3D MMRPG, game development is easier than ever before...we have so many more tools for making better games than existed ten or twenty years ago. The internet is littered with tutorials on game-making, and a large collection of free or cheap programming languages (eg Java, various C++ compilers, Blitz) and tools (eg Eclipse, LWJGL, Dev-C++, SDL, Allegro, DirectX) are available. Ten years ago it would be a lot more work, and likely expense, than it is today to write a 2D space-shooter or a side-scroller.

Does Java use hardware acceleration when drawing if it is available? If it doesn't normally, are there ways of accessing it?

I'd love to program my games in Java, and I think I can handle the slowdown of about 50% that Java is supposed to have vs. C++, in exchange for its being so much easier to code in and so much more portable...but if accellerated blending isn't available, that means a lot more than just 50% slowdown.