My new year’s resolution for 2025 was to spend time writing about games that I love on the ZX Spectrum, particularly those that have been made since the end of its commercial life. Initially the plan was to do that through this very blog, and for a few weeks I really enjoyed highlighting some of my favourite recent classics.
On 24 February 2025 however, I got a message from Spectrum Computing forum member Mpk, asking if I’d like to contribute some reviews to a brand new magazine that was to eventually become known as “Break Space”. This ended up taking over most of my spare time for the year and I’ve been enjoying the experience a lot, it has definitely been what you would call a “labour of love” and I’m very grateful to Mpk for the opportunity.
2025 has been an immense year for the ZX Spectrum, with RGL’s “The Spectrum” and the ZX Spectrum Next both proving extremely popular; a couple of new magazines in the shape of FREEZE-ZX and the aforementioned Break Space, complimenting the now established rebooted bi-monthly Crash magazine; the Yandex compo providing top tier games; Graeme Mason’s “On the Spectrum” emails, websites like Planeta Sinclair, Spectrum Computing and El Mundo del Spectrum still going strong; the LOAD”” Museum in Portugal; brand new game making tools such as ZXGM and Kywll allowing folk with limited coding skills to get creative; Crash Live bringing together plenty of figures from the Speccy scene, past and present; and over 200 new games being added to the ZXDB database. Thanks to Break Space, I have been lucky to play the vast majority of these new games and it has made me realise just how much great stuff is still being made for this beautiful machine.
With all this in mind, I decided to put together a list of my favourite Speccy games that have been released this year. I’m not posting it just yet however, one thing that really bugs me is when these lists come out before the year is over. Few things typify this more than the modern trend for corporations to ape the likes of “Spotify wrapped”, by unleashing the product of their annual data harvesting in late November/early December.
I’ve never understood the urgency to do this however, you never know what twists and turns are going to happen in the last few weeks of the year. Imagine if I was to put out a definitive list of which I thought were the best games of the year without giving the boffins a chance to cook something up behind the scenes that they unleash in the last 2 weeks of 2025. For example, one of my favourite games from 2024 (Gillian’s Mine) was released on 31/12/2024 and it doesn’t get more eleventh hour than that!
So stay tuned Spec-Chums and hopefully I’ll have a wee article covering my favourite games in the new year. I don’t intend for it to be a list of the objectively BEST games, just a small list of ones that have really tickled my fancy. Until then, have a fantastic Christmas (or whatever you choose to celebrate or do over the last couple of weeks of December) and I’ll catch you in 2026!
