The original Elite was amazing, spent so many hours on that, running narcotics to dangerous worlds and getting bigger and better ships. Saved up to get a docking computer as the number of times I crashed into the station trying to dock was unbelievable!
Manic Miner
Greedy Gulch
Tir Na Nog
Bugaboo
Daley Thompsons Decathalon
Bard's Tale
Bomb Jack
Ghosts & Goblins
Marble Madness
Barbarian, The Ultimate Warrior
Arkanoid
Summer Games
Defender of the Crown
Lemmings
I can remember the above games I had for my spectrum, Bards Tale was completely amazing.
When I was 8, we had one of these at home
Used to order books that contained the code to write into the computer to get a game! I spent hours typing in code, line by line and then at the end of it, it didn't work because I'd made a mistake somewhere. They didn't have great compilers back then, had to go back through line by line. You never knew if the game would be any good either and had to invest hours into finding out.
There was a great text based adventure in a pyramid I remember and a very basic grand prix game. Christ I feel old