Does anyone know how I could use sprites?

(Hmm, I think this is the most appropriate forum for this quation)

I'm sure people weren't expecting this one, but I'd like to put a few sprites into a game. I know the engine is capable of supporting them, as it uses them for particle effects and whatnot. Additionally, I saw something in the documentation that went over the intricate detials of sizing a 2D image based upon its distance to the camera. so I'm hoping there's already some functions I can call to employ the use of a sprite instead of a 3D model.

To be fair, I'm still new to scripting, and so I'm not ready to impliment anything at this point, but I would like to get an idea of what's involved and how much work it would be so that I may decide how feasable my idea is before I start any real work.

If it did pan out, I probobly have to do some tweaking to make it change colors/shades when in a shadowy area, have animation frames, frames to be viewed from differant angles, etc, so if anyone has experience with that ype of thing (or a good idea about it), I'd like to pick your brain on how much effort would be required to do that.

And yes, the thought of having just a simple two polygon "bilboard" did cross my mind, but coding it to always face the camera, especially when the object might be pointed in a differant direction, (i.e. when it is moving toward something else) is something that I would wager requires more coding than simply making a sprite.

So does anyone here know how I could use sprites in my game?