A port of a superior game of underground treasure-hunting that could be mistaken as a spoof, but the joke's on us.
The smallest fall will kill you. If you fall from a higher platform, you will die in midair. Everything you do is deadly. The whole general idea of this port was an innocent one and it's obvious difficulty, challenge and a possible fun factor was slightly intended, but the ending result was quite a mess.
Good: Decent graphics * Big levels
Bad: Unforgiving difficulty * Poor control * Repetitive and irritating music * Small falls will kill you * Falling from high places will result in midair death * No checkpoints or continues
Graphics: Maybe the only considerably good part of this whole game. From a glance, it looks like an average early NES game. But the truth is "good" is probably an over-statement as there were many better-looking games at the time of release. Each level is large and have had a fair amount of time spent on detailing them, but the best word to use when explaining the visuals would probably be "basic".
Sound/Music: Spelunker's introductory theme is not all that bad and actually fairly catchy, but it isn't anything worth listening to for a second loop. The main theme during gameplay is simply irritating and loud, almost worth muting the television altogether. It's a repetitive and short tune that gets stuck in your head and refuses to leave, grinding its claws slowly against your skull and pounds at your brain. The sound itself is nothing worth jumping for joy for either, so the best bet would be to simply mute the whole TV, considering if you even want to play this. Oh, and before I forget, the most played song on this game is the death theme.
Difficulty: If I could swear here, I would without a doubt. So, instead, I will replace any strong language with the title of the game, Spelunker. Who in the Spelunker in their right Spelunkering mind would even begin to think to Spelunkering turn a decent game into a Spelunkering piece of Spelunker?! They should have just called this Spelunker storm "Game Over" instead of adding a Spelunkering "game" behind all the Spelunkering death. You can't even Spelunkering play this Spelunkering game, if you even want to call this god-awful hunk of Spelunker a game. It is unholy, it's as if this "game" was made in the devil's Spelunkering workshop. Maybe a real spelunker (yes, I actually meant a real spelunker) should travel down to Hell and punch the devil right in the Spelunkering face for it. But in all seriousness, this game is so hard that it's purely laughable. It's an absolute joke.
Gameplay: One of the absolute worst parts of this whole mess of programming. At first glance, it looks like a normal underground platformer in which the player is meant to explore the caves while avoiding enemies and obsticles and collect all of the treasure. That's what it should have been, but instead has been turned into a chore. If you take too long, a ghost appears and chases you down to kill you. That isn't the only thing to worry about, but there's also a sort of time limit which is resembled as "air". While being very careful not to fall into a small pit that will somehow kill you for no damned reason at all and tapping directional buttons to inch your way through the cave, air tanks must also be picked up to restore air. To progress through the level, keys must be found to unlock doors at the bottom of the level, but has anyone ever been able to do this? You'd probably die after opening all of the doors just because that's the logic of Spelunker. When the player loses a life regardless of the progress on the level, they must start all over again from scratch. There really is no point to having lives. Oh, and one last thing. When the ghost appears and chases the spelunker, it was intended that the player could push a button to make him detatch his air hose from himself and spray the ghost away, but it doesn't work.
Control: Stiff, awkward, uncomfortable and simply not a pleasure to use, the control scheme, while appearing normal, is hard to work with and proves quite picky.
Overall: Different ports have been made of Spelunker before and after the NES version, most of which are far better. It seems almost as if the designers made this as a kick in the face to those who owned an NES but not a computer of some sort that had this game on them, laughing at them for not having one. Whatever the intentions, they could not have been good and they knew exactly what they were doing. It is a very shameful port of a better cave-dwelling game that should've never been made, or at least done far better than this. With an excruciating difficulty that makes any form of progress impossible, it's a wonder anyone's ever beaten this without cheats, that is, if anyone even has. The bottom line, do not waste your money on this piece of !$%# no matter how much you can find it for. You'd be better off buying a cyanide capsule. On a brighter note, an amazing fan game of the better Spelunker games exist as a sort of adventure/platformer game free for download called Spelunky. It's definitely worth a look and would be more worth the time than this.