Best Zx Spectrum Games

The best ZX Spectrum games to start with are Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner, Sabre Wulf, The Sentinel and Knight Lore. Between them they cover the machine's precise platformers, its flip-screen mazes, its isometric adventures and one strange 3D puzzle game. You can run them on a small handheld such as the Anbernic RG34XX through the Fuse core in RetroArch.

Jet Set Willy

Jet Set Willy is the 1984 sequel to Manic Miner and was the UK's best-selling home video game that year. Miner Willy has thrown a huge party, and his housekeeper Maria won't let him go to bed until he tidies every item left around the mansion. That chore spreads over 60 screens, including a beach and a yacht, and you can tackle them in any order. Willy can only walk, jump, climb stairs and hang from swinging ropes, so most of the difficulty is judging where a jump will land. The original release has a famous flaw: the Attic Bug makes it impossible to finish without the fixes Software Projects later published.

Manic Miner

Manic Miner came first, in 1983, written by Matthew Smith and built around 20 single-screen caverns. In each one, Willy must collect the flashing objects before his oxygen runs out, then reach the exit. The air gauge is the clock, so every wasted jump costs you twice. It plays Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" throughout. If you want the tighter, more structured of the two Willy games, start here.

Sabre Wulf

Ultimate Play the Game released Sabre Wulf in 1984. It has no separate levels. It is one jungle maze of 256 flip-screens in a 16 by 16 grid, and your job as Sabreman is to find the four pieces of an amulet that will get you past the guardian at the exit. Spiders, scorpions, snakes, bats and hippos fill the screens. Your sabre deals with some of them, but it does nothing against the wolf or the bushfire that chases you if you stand still. The game gives no instructions, so you work out the goal by trial and error, and drawing a map helps.

The Sentinel

The Sentinel, Geoff Crammond's 1986 puzzle game, reached the Spectrum in a port by Mike Follin. You play a Synthoid, a telepathic robot that cannot walk. You start at the lowest point of a solid 3D landscape, create boulders and new Synthoid shells, and transfer your mind upward until you can see the Sentinel's platform. Then you absorb the Sentinel. It drains your energy whenever it sees you, so each move has to account for its line of sight. Nothing else on this list plays like it.

Knight Lore

Knight Lore followed Sabre Wulf from Ultimate in November 1984, and it was widely hailed as a landmark in British gaming. Its Filmation engine drew isometric rooms in which sprites pass convincingly in front of and behind each other. Sabreman now turns into a werewolf at nightfall and has 40 days to collect items from Melkhior the Wizard's castle and brew a cure. Reviewers at the time faulted its sound, slowdown and harsh difficulty, and Kieron Gillen later called it "enormously innovative, incredibly atmospheric, and totally unplayable." It is worth playing for that engine alone.

Each of these five asks for patience before it pays off. Start with Manic Miner if you like clear goals, and go to The Sentinel if you want something that still feels unlike anything else.