YMMV / Spelunker

• Adaptation Displacement: It was originally written for the Atari 8 bit computer and Commodore 64, but everyone remembers the extra unforgiving NES version.
• Awesome Music: The lyrics of the anime's theme song may make no sense but at least the music, a remix of the video game's main theme and level complete theme, is pretty nice.
• Demonic Spiders: Everything, really, but especially spiders in Spelunker HD. They're practically invisible against the background and surprisingly hard to jump over. They also travel in packs.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Created in the USA, where it's fallen into obscurity; but still sufficiently popular in Japan that parodies of it appear in anime made decades after the game's release, such as Unlimited Psychic Squad. It also received a Japanese-exclusive, In Name Only sequel which plays more like an action RPG.
• Memetic Loser: Spelunker will forever be remembered as one of the most fragile video game characters of all time for his inability to survive bat guano, pits anyone else could just easily climb out of, or falls greater than a few inches. Even, by Spelunker Party, the game considers him a loser, in that the Call to Adventure went to Spelunkette!
• Memetic Mutation: In Japan, there's many remixes of the NES version's main level music, and the Spelunker himself shows up in many remix videos, such as this one. The fragility of the protagonist is also memetic, to the point where a 2ch-created custom fighter version of the Spelunker designed for MUGEN used extra lives instead of a normal lifebar and was just as fragile as he was in the NES original.
• So Bad, It Was Better: Irem's arcade version reduced the Nintendo Hard difficulty by removing fall damage and giving the spelunker a weapon to defend himself. However, many players felt that it also removed the charm of the game and turned it into another action platformer.

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