The Gaming Den

Being a typical ugly American, I used to be pretty snobby and dismissive towards the ZX Spectrum, until I found out about its price tag. The specs might not be very whizbang in a vacuum, but for a 100 pound launching price in 1982 that's one hell of bargain.

I just have a few questions:
How much money would it have cost to have packaged the ZX spectrum with a better GPU and sound chip? The technical specifications otherwise are pretty competitive with other 8-bit consoles of its eras, but the graphics... yeah. They aren't very good, even compared to other consoles/computers. I know the ZX is a working man's computer but I feel that charging an extra 30-40 pounds for a better GPU and/or sound chip would've made it completely demolish the competition of that generation both overseas and in Europe.

What are the best games for the ZX that aren't platformers or shoot-em-ups? Any good adventure games or RPGs?

I figure it should be possible to look up the costs for the graphics and sound hardware the C64 had and just add that to the cost of a Spectrum.

A Spectrum 48K was £175 at launch and the C64 was $595 later the same year. At 57p/dollar that makes the spectrum about half the price. I guess that the C64 also dropped its price the next year, but I don't know numbers for that.