Originally released on the Atari in 1983, Tim Martin's Spelunker is famous for being a bad, unreasonably hard game, even by the standards of the time. I first became familiar with the series via Irem's 2009 remake on the PS3, Spelunker HD. Spelunker HD was very difficult and had gameplay mechanics unlike anything else I was familiar with, but I completely fell for it, with it quickly becoming one of my favorite Playstation Network titles. I heard that the original version was much worse, but I'd never had a chance to check it out until recently, when the NES version of the original game showed up on the 3DS Virtual Console. As it turns out, it's still a pretty great game, even in this much more primitive form, but it's so short that it feels like a demo in comparison to Spelunker HD.
