Amaurote is a strange, isometric action game, developed by Binary Design and published by Mastertronic in 1987. It first appeared on the ZX Spectrum and was later ported to other systems.

You control a spider-like craft (called Arachnus 4) that crawls along the ground and can shoot bouncing bombs out of a hole in the top of the vehicle. Unfortunately, though, the Arachnus can only fire one bomb at a time, so you have to wait for the last one to either explode or time-out, before you can fire another.

The aim of the game is to explore various ‘sectors’ (selectable from a map screen), in order to hunt down the queen of an invading alien insect race. When you find the queen you must then radio in for a ‘Supa Bomb’ to take her out.

Amaurote is still reasonably interesting to play now, although the game does play very slowly. And – like many Spectrum isometric games of the time – it also suffers somewhat from slowdown.

There were two different versions of Amaurote released – a 48K version, and an enhanced 128K version with continuous music by David Whittaker.

More: Amaurote on Wikipedia