The thing is, I can't really use screen drawing functions for my collision detection routine, as a lot of these collisions will happen off-screen. That's why I want to go with the collision boxes idea, as everything needed for checking for collisions will then be hardcoded into the game logic and won't require any screen drawing or checking of textures and sprites. Plus, it'll be a lot faster.

I'll just continue doing the box drawing manually, I guess...