Terrible graphics
Almost completely unable to handle motion
Most games have no music
The ones with music have terrible music
Terrible sound effects
As someone with a 2600, 5200, Intellivision, Colecovision, Odyssey 2, and Vectrex the Spectrum is still completely unplayable. I cannot fathom anyone enjoying it in any capacity. It is worse than all of those systems in every way.
Upon release it was way shittier than the 2600, which beat it to market by 5 whole years.
Again pretty much all those things have been addressed with the next.
Take a look at the warhawk video I posted.
And that was one of the first “new” games developed for the system, Theres other impressive looking games to.
The thing I always find really funny about the ZX spectrum was how Sinclair designed it and wanted it to be a serious desktop workstation used for serious work stuff.
And famously threw a massive tantrum when he found out it was being adopted as a games machine!
Dont get me wrong here I dont have huge love for any of the old micros, I never owned a spectrum back in the day, We had a C64 but some of my friends had one so there is a little nostalgia there but not heaps.
But the Next is a different machine really, Yeah its fully backwards compatible and can do everything it could do. but it can do so much more beside the fact.
I know Micros were not as popular stateside as they were in Europe but the Specky played a HUGE part in the development of the gaming industry and a big part of its history.
It was like the 8 bit game console that was never meant to exist with a massive following of fans and developers.