A new Spectrum went on sale this week, evoking a golden era of British computing - a time when cassette tapes were hip, lengthy loading times perfectly acceptable, and a tiny 48KB was enough memory to run the best games around.

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But with the new Spectrum Vega bringing a treasure trove of more than 1,000 classic titles back onto the market for a new generation to discover, we've hit rewind on our tape deck and rounded up 16 of the best games the Speccy had to offer.

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1. Chase HQ

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Chase HQ put players behind the wheel of a turbo-charged Porsche 928 and had them hurtle through cities at one thousand miles an hour, bagging as many perps as possible along the way.

It was Miami Vice with a dash of Dirty Harry badassery as players ploughed their vehicle into criminals' cars to run them off the road - and the Speccy handled this arcade port impeccably.

2. The Hobbit

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The Spectrum wasn't exactly equipped for fantasy epics of Peter Jackson proportions, so when Melbourne House brought The Hobbit to the platform in 1982 we got a text adventure with a few nice backgrounds.

However, this turned out to be no bad thing as The Hobbit's advanced artificial intelligence and inventive puzzles helped it take interactive fiction to new heights. It also became the first Speccy game to shift more than 1 million copies.

3. Target Renegade

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Target Renegade graduated from the same school of hard-knocks as Double Dragon and we remember it fondly as one of the greatest beat-em-ups ever to punch its way onto the Spectrum.

Players took control of a street fighting man and brought the smack down to hordes of thugs to avenge the murder of the protagonist's brother. It was vengeful brutality at its very best.

4. Atic Atac

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Long before Rare duo Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper reinvented Donkey Kong and revolutionised console shooters with Goldeneye 64, they brought us a humble maze-running horror fest for Spectrum called Atic Atac.

Players ran the gauntlet against a menagerie of monsters straight out of the Hammer Horror vault as they fled from a haunted house. Scary? Hardly, but a graveyard smash nonetheless.

5. Rainbow Islands

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Rainbow Islands was the cheery sequel to Bubble Bobble and another arcade port that translated to the Speccy rather well. The character models were transparent and clashed with the backgrounds, but there was a staggering amount of colour on display considering the machine's limited pallet.

A masterpiece of beauty, design and sheer playability, Rainbow Islands saw players firing rainbows to smite their enemies and create bridges to higher levels, a unique superpower that would come in handy in virtually any game ever made.

6. The Great Escape

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While most people think of iconic images of Steve McQueen on a motorcycle or that famous theme tune when someone utters the words 'great' and 'escape' in immediate succession, we can't help but recall Ocean's 1986 arcade-adventure.

The Great Escape was loosely based on the classic movie of the same name back in the days when film adaptions weren't exclusively terrible. It cast players as a prisoner of war who had to employ careful strategies to give his German captors the slip, and we felt nothing short of triumphant when making our own daring getaway.

7. Back to Skool

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Nobody liked going back to school after the summer holidays, but playing Back to Skool on Spectrum during the summer holidays was another matter entirely.

Letting us run riot with our bike and catapult while avoiding the detention-happy headmaster made education fun like never before, although we're not sure how much we actually learned from this game.

8. Manic Miner

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In-game music and sound effects, replay value and colourful graphics - these things were novelties before the influential Manic Miner tunnelled its way onto ZX Spectrum in 1983.

Matthew Smith's seminal jump fest might look like an ancient relic by today's standards, but it will always be the granddaddy of modern platformers.

9. Daley Thompson's Decathlon

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Daley Thompson's Decathlon was a joystick-killing tribute to one of Britain's finest athletes in which players competed in 8-bit renditions of various sporting events.

Most of these events involved nothing more than frenzied joystick-waggling or key-smashing, and they required almost as much endurance as their real-life counterparts. It was responsible for as many broken controllers as it was injured wrists, but we loved it all the same.

10. Fantasy World Dizzy

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The Oliver Twins' boxing-gloved egg Dizzy became a mascot of sorts for the Speccy, starring in one smash after another between 1987 and 1992.

His third outing Fantasy World Dizzy was his finest hour, in the sense that it was the most complete entry in the series, adding much-needed balance by giving players three lives and sorting out the inventory issues that marred the previous games. It was cracking good fun, too.

11. The Lords of Midnight

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The Lords of Midnight was in a class of its own when it stormed the Spectrum in 1984, effortlessly merging the adventure and strategy genres and telling an epic tale of swords and sorcery.

It was one of the great classics of the 8-bit age of computing, and the entire thing weighed in at just 41KB. The tip of Batman's little finger in Arkham Knight probably demands more than that.

12. Lode Runner

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Lode Runner was a ladder-scaling puzzler from the studio that went on to bring us Prince of Persia. There was a lot of climbing involved, plenty of head scratching, and some optional level editing.

In fact, Lode Runner was one of the first games to launch with a level editor included, so the roots of community and sharing culture in gaming stretch back to here. And while we're doing fun facts, Tetris designer Alexey Pajitnov names Lode Runner as his favourite game.

13. Jet Set Willy

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Jet Set Willy was an expansive sequel to Manic Miner that found our now-wealthy protagonist cleaning up his mansion on the morning after a celebration that made Project X look like a tea party at a retirement home.

Miner Willy's second outing was a giant leap for platformers. Gone were the single-screen levels of Manic Miner, replaced by a vast array of rooms filled with bizarre creatures, hazards, collectible items and mind-boggling jumps that could be tackled in non-linear fashion.

14. Head Over Heels

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Head Over Heels was no less surreal than the Prince Charles-Dalek hybrid that appeared on its cover, yet it was equally original, playable, and endearing.

Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond's isometric masterpiece built on everything they achieved with their previous game Batman with a larger map and an innovative dual-protagonist approach that set it apart from anything else on the Speccy.

15. Chuckie Egg

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Chuckie Egg is what Chicken Run might have been if the chickens were murderous fiends with a giant caged duck on their side.

This insanely-addictive platformer saw players take control of a farmer and battle it out with a coup of deadly hens for control of the farm. Quirky, fun, and every inch a ZX Spectrum game.

16. Elite

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There are many reasons why we love Elite. Not only was David Braben's space-trading classic light years ahead of its time, it's still the closest we've ever come to fulfilling our lifelong dream of becoming Han Solo.

Whether playing it safe and dealing in agricultural goods or battling Thargoids in hostile alien territories, Elite was 8-bit escapism at its most absorbing and our favourite game for Sir Clive Sinclair's rubber-keyed wonder.

Honourable mentions: Knight Lore, Chaos, Karnov, Robocop, Sabre Wolf, Match Day 2, Jet-Pac, Deus Ex Machina, Dan Dare, R-Type

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