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.