Or... make a hole in it for the background to show through.
Or you could always do the Worms thing an make a parallax scroll. Ofcourse this would mean you'd have to make scrolly maps... :o> Flameduck you were working on `minimum safe distance` which was a kind of worms-like game, right?
Nope. I was working on NetBlaster, which was something completely different. I believe the SDS guys (Rob? Lucy?) where working on MSD. As to the land drop, yeah, it's not so easy with these new fangled drawing-focussed but not reading-focussed graphics API's.
Which is why you need to do it on a second buffer in system memory, and then draw it to screen, preferably using a 'dirty rects' type algorithm.