MiuraX

Pilot to Autodestruction

While Spain's Miura 1 rocket represents proper aerospace engineering, MIURAX is a far messier, apocalyptic tribute to Spanish space ambitions—and to the Miura fighting bull bloodline, where angry things charge at you relentlessly. This Sinclair BASIC gem from ZXMoe casts you as Spain's last pilot attempting to escape Earth aboard the nuclear-powered MiuraX spacecraft as a cosmic anomaly is carving through the galaxy like a hot knife through butter, turning Mercury and Venus into the deadly meteor storm you're now dodging. Your mission: pilot your rocket vertically with one key, dodging an absolutely mental debris field that switches between horizontal charges and sly 45-degree diagonals like a swarm of confused wasps. Each red meteor collision chips away at your shield (tracked by a grim progress bar counting down to your doom), and the goal is simple: reach the top for points, then get dumped back at the bottom to do it all over again because apparently one escape attempt isn't enough. One does wonder where the bloody hell you're supposed to be going, but perhaps that's beside the point when extinction is nipping at your heels. You can grab colour-coded meteors—gold ones for points, blue ones to restore your battered ship's shield—but good luck timing the grab with your sluggish inertial controls. Here's the brilliant bit: hit SPACE for discotheque-esque magenta energy blasts that obliterate everything in sight... including your own systems. Turns out your weapons are so devastatingly powerful they drain your shield. The rocket handles like it's moving through treacle thanks to spot-on inertia physics, whilst meteors (courtesy of the clever DEFADD trick) zip around like mad. You need to press your key well before you actually need to move, or you're scuppered. It's frustrating, frantic, and mildly addictive—like bullfighting against cosmic annihilation.

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