OSCAR COOPER
I was 9, I had 56 games for my spectrum, but a few of them stood out
1987 Hewson Consultants
I bloody loved Exolon, looking at it now it was well ahead of its time, a side scrolling platformer will striking colours and crazy AI. Space, guns, cool rocket grenade things, it ticked all the boxes. One measure of this games acceptability was that back then, having your own TV wasn't a realistic idea on a paper round wage, so I had to share my geek time with two sisters, now if you have sisters you'll know that they will watch any old tripe so long as you don't put your "stupid computer games on". But Exolon transcended that barrier, they loved it, and at points were better than me (don't tell anyone)
1984 David Braben and Ian Bell
Elite was pretty mental, it was the sort of game i would have never picked out off the shelf, the screenshots looked like the most boring thing ever, but it was far from it. Intergalactic trading was the order of the day, flying and mapping your journey around what seemed endless space with cargo that you had either nicked or picked up from a docking station. Taking this material to other sections of the galaxy was all you had to do, it sounded simple but between you and the destination were hordes of space pirates all with their own type of ships and weapons. The opening titles featured the Space Odyssey music (that was wasted on me at 11yrs old) but looking back, it only seems grow in strength with hind sight, it was later improved for the Amiga and was one of the strongest games on the platform, a remake for IOS, is a no brainer.
1989 Rainbow Arts
Contra, Side Arms, Midnight Resistance, were all excellent side scrolling shooters, Turrican 1 and 2 was the first experience I had with this genre. Jumping,shooting and well, that was it really, but it never got too boring as you had all kinds of crap to kill.The game was hard as nails and getting lost in some dead ended cave would happen frequently, the cover art pulled me in while spotting it on the shelves and i never looked back. The graphics are a bit of a comedown today but it ran well and it kept the variation up with the environments and Boss's. It was a style of game that became the blueprint for most of the 90's and there was good reason for that.