Much like Arkista's Ring, I don't know whether I'm allowed to put this game under "completed" since the game asks you to beat it seven or eight times. I will and you won't stop me, though.

Spelunker fascinated me for a long time. Its jank called out to me.

The first thing you do in Spelunker is die. You might think that walking across a gap that's not wide enough for your character to fall in won't be an issue, but no. As soon as you press right in this game, you are dead. However, there lies the only tutorial Spelunker really needs. As you watch your hero not plummet to death, but instead fall 2 cm and blink out of existence, Spelunker reveals its true nature: you can't fall at all. Any height higher than maybe half of your own sprite will instantly kill you.

There's a simple joy to Spelunker much like one you can find in Donkey Kong. However, Donkey Kong doesn't really weaponize the want to go down. In Spelunker, it's all you do.

Despite that, I wouldn't call Spelunker that hard of a game. If not for tiny obstables killing you the only real issue is that your hero LOVES to stick to ladders and vines. It kinda helps you as you don't need to time your up press while jumping onto one, but for whatever reason, at least the NES version, makes it a little difficult to jump off them.

Otherwise, the mechanics of the game are easy. The stages are pretty sprawling, but the constant need to go down makes it easy not to get lost, and you only have a few rare interactions with the world aside from jumping: blowing up rocks with bombs and shooting (?) the ghost. Otherwise you just descend down levels while collecting time ups, various score items, and keys you'll need at the end of each of the 4 stages the game has.

I've enjoyed my time with this game, but only after putting down a save state at the beginning of each level. The controls aren't as good as Donkey Kong or its sequel, so once you actually get how the game works most deaths will feel like not your fault as something stupid will happen, such as the player character not unsticking from the vine and being blown away by an explosion of the bomb you set up.

A pretty simple 8 bit platformer. Much better than the original game, though. Looks and sounds way better.

It's about as easy as the original Kid Niki, though. Pretty much every enemy dies in one hit, and the bosses don't pose any threat. Thankfully your staff also doesn't bounce off of them this time.

You do have a few new moves such as attacking upward or downward, but the strangest new thing comes with the animal transformation: a limited-use ability that can transform you into a frog, an elephant, or a bird. I have used it once when I found a secret area and realized that I must have some form of high jump and never again.

The game isn't built for this ability, and can be easily cleared just using your main attack.

It's a comfy little game. Nothing special at all, but at least the levels are all very different, and there's plenty of different baddies.

What a comlete and utter mess. An abomination of a video game.

I was somewhat familiar with Kid Niki series through Kid Niki 3, a game that came out only in Japan and as a pirated ROMhack "Mario 14" known to many Russian kids as "Mario with a stick". It poorly replaced Niki's head as Mario in some of the sprites. That game wasn't perfect, the camera was kinda bad, but it was a masterpiece compared to this.

Kid Niki is one of the easiest classic NES games I've played. It features exactly 2 actions: jump and hit, and according to RetroAchievements some secret areas I never found. I once got a shield, but I never felt the need for it. While the game swarms you with enemies, they're all braindead, just running at you, so the strategy to winning Kid Niki is to be patient and to move a few feet before stopping and hitting next enemy with a stick.

The game is awfully ugly and features some janky hitboxes. Thankfully what that meant is that I usually didn't die to enemies, not the other way around, although that only became a problem at the final boss. The designs of most things is awful, and one of the levels starts looking like an Atari 2600 game in the most literal sense of that word. The game never features that many things on screen yet loves to flicker and display animations that just seem incomplete.

The most unique "gimmick" of this game is that when you hit a boss your stick flies away and you have to pick it up. Sometimes it doesn't, which led me to killing the first phase of the final boss way faster, but I'm not complaning. Play Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 3 instead of this.