Inferno style games

Akin and Core Dump come to mind. But those games do scroll. With success..

yes, but they are not from 'commercial' sw houses in the msx time (late 80's).
maybe the sw houses were too lazy to use sw sprites?

Youma Kourin is by far the best commercial game for use of sw sprites mixed to hw sprites
It has also vertical scrolling and a great PSG music and voice samples too iirc
http://youtu.be/RaNlod5A_io

I think part of reason is that the msx homebrew scene had over 25 years to to perfect their/our software sprite skills while developers back then were (most likely) on deadlines.

I remember a game called butapork or something that had sw sprites I think, but its been 20 years since I last played it so I not sure.

As much as I like software sprites, I think it isn’t fair to say they were “lazy”. Hardware sprites have their own benefits, they are very fast and you can show tons of them on screen. Games like Aleste could not have been made with software sprites.

Additionally hardware sprites are easy to use… meaning you have greater flexibility to just move them around in interesting patterns and still spend time on other game logic. I suppose a game like USAS could have used software sprites, but there would be a limit on how much it can show at the same time, and how flexibly it could be used. And I don’t think anyone can complain that game doesn’t look good!

Also, and I think this is very important but not everyone gets it: spending less time on creating the most awesome optimised graphics engine, means you can spend more time on gameplay programming. Would you rather have character sprites with a few more colours, or levels with moving parts, smarter enemies and more interesting boss fights?

Sprites have their use, and yes they may be easier to use but that doesn’t mean people were lazy, rather it means that they were making smart choices.

Finally, software sprites were used plenty on MSX2: SD Snatcher, Metal Gear 2, Ys series, Xak series… Yes predominantly RPGs but that is exactly because their pacing and framerate requirements suits software sprites well, whereas in an action game hardware sprites are often a better choice because you don’t want framerate to drop when you have more than a few enemies and projectiles on screen.