On this app’s page in the App Store it tells us that it’s a work in progress and that the developers will be dealing with the shortcomings in future updates.

As such, I’m not going to be as harsh as I otherwise would be – I won’t be swearing – but I’ve tried three of the six included games in this pack and none of them have been remotely playable.

ZX Spectrum: Elite Collection

Free-roaming shooting, driving and pedestrian killing - 80s style!

The controls just don’t work, requiring too much thumb precision to be remotely usable. I’m a firm defender of virtual controls, simply because they can and do work in many games, but the tiny diagonals of Chuckie Egg and the thumb-twisting layout of Turbo Esprit are incredibly hard to deal with.

(The unlicensed ZX Nostalgia did a far better job with its virtual stick solution to the problem – Chuckie Egg was reasonably playable on that emulator, certainly far better than this offering. Unfortunately, being unlicensed, it was soon taken down. It’s back now, but with a set of licensed games that I’ve never heard of.)

Hopefully the developers will respond to feedback and offer, say, a virtual Kempston joystick or something. At the moment, this just isn’t worth it, even when each game costs 10p. Okay, maybe it’s just about worth it for the nostalgic joy of seeing proto-GTA Turbo Esprit running on your phone, but you’re not going to be actually playing it for very long.