A bit about my blog

It has come to my attention that people disagree with some or all of my opinions. Which is nice

It appears that not everyone agrees with my ramblings. In fact, hardly anyone does. And I have no issues with this. For the avoidance of doubt, I write these pages as a form of self therapy: nothing here is meant as a source of truth, and should not be relied upon as such. And whilst there may be some factualities buried here, like a newspaper, those truths are surrounded by a lot of hyperbol, misinformation, half truths and opinion. The difference here is that I am not now - nor have I ever been - any kind of journalist, whereas those writers for those newspapers often claim to be. I am a creative writer, and the only thing that one might ascertain from reading one or more of my blog posts is whatever was in my head at the time of writing, expressed in English words typed out and wrapped in HTML tags for your entertainment purposes. Or not. You could be here equally to hate read and rage, though as someone who has had high blood pressure, I wouldn't recommend that.

In any case, even if you might disagree with me, my opinions, or my conclusions about any given subject matter, then that's healthy. That's called reading. If what I say upsets or offends you, my advice is not to read. But I take a lead from what is being read according to the statistics for each blog post here, and almost certainly some of my most read pages are regarding the Sinclair-branded ZX Spectrum Next, or the ZX Multisystem as it should now be more accurately called.

I guess here that I'm managing a skill that some parts of the Internet are all about: click bait. But in my defence, my views on the ZX Spectrum Next ZX Multisystem computer are honest to my experience of the platform and what I see that is happening to it. Other opinions are available. You may trust, however, that it's not just the ZX Spectrum Next ZX Multisystem in which my views differ from some of the mainstream of the wider "retro community". A caveat here is that I've not been active in said community since around 2012; and when I started to get interested again, as one might expect, everything had changed, and not necessarily for the better.

When I did return (and I'm not saying here that I'm actively and overtly involved like I used to be), I was happy to see that Retro Gamer magazine was still a thing; although it's not a magazine that I would read nor purchase on a regular basis. I think I've procured around 4 issues since 2019 or so. Whilst I could offer my services to it again (and it is just a case of dropping an email to the editor with a proposal of one or more futures, it's not a little more complicated than that), it would be fraudulent to do so. Why write for a publication that one does not read oneself? The last issue I saw didn't give me an impression that this magazine was for someone like me. That's my opinion anyway. It has it's audience, and I'm not one of them.

This is why I ended up joining the BreakSpace team: reading issue one of that was and is pure joy; it is a publication with heart by people who review ZX Spectrum games for all of the right reasons. Thankfully, I was let in to opine on the latest Speccy entertainment software from issue two, and at the time of writing, I've already written 18 reviews for issue three, with some more to do before the looming deadline.

It's great to be writing again and for a publication like BreakSpace, and it's good that I have this blog as an outlet. As already stated, the purpose here is, or has latterly become, to entertain. This blog is so old, I don't remember why I started it in the first place: the likely reason though is because I could. I'm surprised that people still read blogs: like printed magazines, I thought they'd be dead by now, but I do understand Vinny Mainolfi's point about printed matter: landfill sites now have too many waste electronic devices, including tablets, eBook readers and smart phones, so the printed press might not be as environmentally damaging as publishing electronically after all. Anyway, I have more games to review and a deadline to hit. So, I'll leave it there.

The Kickstarter version 3 Sinclair-branded ZX Spectrum Next can play some excellent games, you know

The latest installment in the ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter saga raised over £2.5m

Sometimes, developers for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the parent platform to the ZX Spectrum Next, really surprises me. Be it a demo, or a new piece of entertainment software, it has brought to me much enjoyment over the years, and I've written many words about the good games that have been released since 2002, most notably between then and circa 2015 when life circumstances forced me to stop my weekly "Retro" column, much to the relief of my editor at the time.

Recently, through my work with the excellent publication BreakSpace, I found out about a lot of new game software. If I focus on the recently released Cubix for a moment, this should help to clarify my point (do I ever have a point though?) - at least induldge my aimless waffle.

Cubix is a masterpiece of 8-bit gaming, both in terms of pure enjoyment, and technical achievement. I've not been this impressed with a Speccy game since Jonathan Cauldwell's GameX: The Games Exchange, or Bob Smith's super colourful and pretty intense splATTR, and I commend both games to you wholeheartedly.

Cubix reminds me a little of Nebulus, released by Hewson Consultants in 1987, but is very much its own game. Starting out as just another platformer, you get so far in and you find that there is a virtual twist to proceedings: things start moving in three dimensions, as the platforms rotate horizontally. Not only does this look rather resplendent and technically outstanding, it also proves the point that the best games for the Sinclair-branded ZX Spectrum Next are just plain old ZX Spectrum games that run on out-of-the-box Sinclair hardware to the specific memory requirements of said software. The suggestion that the Spectrum Next was or is THE next geneation Spectrum is now gone, perhaps forever.

One might also argue that, with the inclusion of a Commodore C64 compatible core, and also a ZX81 core, the best games for the Next might also include C64 and ZX81 games. Surely, that's hyperbol, especially noting the old monochrome '81, right? Well, I invite readers to play Bob Smith's One Little Ghost, Boulder Logic, Virus or Pandemic, and tell me if these aren't worth your time. As what's happened with the Speccy, in terms of its best ever software releases happening after its commercial decline, the same has happened on these two platforms as well.

My point is that the Next doesn't have a great software library outside of what was already available by virtue of its parent platform. And whilst adding nice graphics and improved sound to existing and already well known games might give those titles a new lease of life, fundementally one is unable to escape the fact that you are essentially playing the same game. This is why I never liked the PC "Remakes" scene too much, as the Monty on the Run remake was still just Monty on the Run, for instance, so why not just play the original? Although some remakes were more liberal with their implementations, of course, or provided something that the original game could never do because of the vintage hardware specifications.

One thing to note about the £2.5m raised, adjusted for inflation as of 2025-09-16, the original [KS1] amount of £723,390 would be worth approximately £1,063,380, and the KS2 amount of £1,847,106 would be some £2,715,245 today, at least according to this UK Inflation calculator. Of course, these adjusted numbers don't tell the whole story; the KS1 campaign was 289% funded, its second iteration was 739% funded, and its third and maybe final being 1045% funded. Drilling down into the data further, from KS1 to KS2 increased the number of backers by 2,123, and despite the headline figure of the amount raised by the third installment, it managed to add another 2,288 backers from the second campaign. I know Kickstarter is funding driven, but I would have considered a strategy of getting the total number of backers to 10,000, or as close as possible to that, before starting the campaign. As Commodore.net's 64 Ultimate has proven, that should have been possible to do, although the beauty of what Commodore.net is doing is that it is not time limited in the same way, and is something the team behind the Spectrum Next should consider, in my view.

It looks to me like the Spectrum Next will continue to be a posh way to play classic and new Spectrum games on modern televisions. And whilst other solutions are available to do just this, at a much cheaper price, the aesphetic of the Next is definitely much more beautiful that those other solutions. Well, a fool and his money is easily parted, which is why I decided to procure a Commodore.net 64 Ultimate and not back the latest Kickstarter campaign for the Next. I don't need another Next, and honestly can't think of a good use for one; aside from the ZX81 core, the new features offered weren't really of any interest to me, the platform itself seems diluted, perhaps deliberately so, and honestly I thought at the time that it'd be of more value to invest in a MiSTer FPGA solution over the Spectrum Next KS3. The only problem with the MiSTer is that I'd only be using one or two of the cores available, so I'm still not wholly convinced by that either.