The ZX Spectrum games that ought to be on Steam

If you’re British and you’re old, then you love the ZX Spectrum. (Or the Commodore 64, I suppose, but not both. Never both.) Personally, I’m what they called a “Speccy” kid, and I have carried a deep and profound love of the elderly microcomputer’s cassette tape screeches, colour clash and long, long load times into my adult life, despite the fact that – and please don’t get upset, purists – many of the great Spectrum games don’t hold up in the cold light of the modern day. It’s not that the games are necessarily bad, more that they were tremendous for their time. Still eminently enjoyable, but they require the player to get their head into a certain zone, to put up with what are inarguably quite archaic controls and mechanics.

Oddly enough, there are some Spectrum games on Steam, thanks to a publisher called Pixel Games. However, with the utmost respect to their output… these are not the kind of games that are going to foster interest in the Speccy amongst modern players. Of course, that may well not be the point, but I’d be a little taken aback if even avowed old-school gamers were going to bother picking up the likes of gardening simulator Pedro, a game that scored 63% in Newsfield’s iconic Crash magazine back in the day, or Sam Stoat: Safebreaker, which did a little better at 68%.

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