I'm kind of new the XNA and don't really know about what it can do. I was wondering if it's possible to make a 2d side scroller that let's the player move around left to right and limited up and down. Examples: old school teenage mutant ninja turtle games, double dragon NES games.

I know that's possible to do... a tutorial on how to do it, that I don't know of.

I would probably create some kind of color key map that your character always had to stay on... not sure if that is how they did it or not.

George's racing game tutorial is the closest thing I know of to a tutorial on this sort of mechanic.

http://www.xnadevelopment.com/tutorials/theroadnottaken/theroadnottaken.shtml

If you're new to XNA and you want to make a simple oldschool 2D platform you can simply use the SpriteBatch class to draw objects on the screen.
The graphics of the objects is defined by a Texture2D (you also pack more of one frame on a texture, making a texture atlas - you can find a tutoral on this site).

Now you simply begin the drawing, drawing all the objects needed, and ending the drawing.

Here you can find also a tiled grid tutorial to draw the background.

I hope it's help.

P.S: You can also watch at http://www.ziggyware.com/

awesome. thanks for the help.