Spy Fox In: Hold the Mustard

spy fox hold the goy

I've got mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, I think the gameplay itself is just fine at best. On the other hand, I really enjoy King Konglomerate as a character and think overall the introduction of a proper story in this arcade game warrants some praise. Still, I would only really say to get this on sale, possible within the Spy Fox Complete Pack or Humongous Entertainment Complete Pack.

Spy Fox in Hold The Mustard is an ancient family friendly 1988/DOS era shoot 'em up arcade game running on Steam thanks to the ScummVM engine. Gameplay involves guiding a space ship/thing with a cartoon fox in it around shooting stuff, coupled with some kind of retro pixel story about gorillas and ketchup. Whatever. This game is over 25 years old, it's ancient. 4:3, fixed resolution (looks like VGA). Weirdly, the devs have patched it from time to time, but this is really like putting lipstick on the skeleton of a pig that died long ago. I know that's not all that nice to say, but these guys are charging $5 USD for this, when you can play free games for kids, with much higher quality, in browsers or mobile, so how could anyone consider paying for this? This is just some attempt to cash in on some old abandoned kids game. It's really not cool.

[h1] Don’t be afraid of the game! [/h1] Before you turn away because of my thumbs down, remember one this: If you have ANY inkling of nostalgia for this game and simply want to rejoice in what is technically a working, on-the-side fun game, then go for it – especially when it’s on sale. BUT, if you came to this title looking for a further instalment of the prior point-and-click games, you´ll be sourly disappointed. [h3] Is it still worth today? [/h3] This question is honestly a lot simpler to answer than I want it to be. The game is okay and below. The controls are feeling old and unpolished, even if they´re fine practically, the gameplay is repetitive and there’s no more to it than meets the eye. If you buy this in the 5-games SpyFox saga bundle, you´re fine off with it. Otherwise, maybe skip this one if you have no other particular reason to buy it. In the most general sense, it´s pretty boring and not everything runs super smoothly by design. You can tell the age from how hitboxes work, how the levels scroll and how everything else comes together. There’s nothing to be gained from this title and it actually feels very overpriced in todays world. I really think it's just about fine, but not more than that - even for someone looking at this through a nostalgic pair of glasses.

echt goed

This one has technically more variety than most of the other HE Junior arcade and therefor you might actually be able to play through this game, but if you do not have any nostalgia for this game or spy fox in general then I would not bother.

[b]‘Live and Let Die.’[/b] I should preface this by saying that several years ago I stopped playing this when I was about halfway through the campaign, and it was only very recently that I resumed. Normally it would be fairer to review something when all of it is fresh in your memory, but once I returned, it quickly became apparent why I took such a long break. [i]Hold the Mustard[/i] is a [i]SPY Fox[/i] spin-off about destroying automata that are trying to steal all of the world’s tomatoes. It plays very similarly to [i]Asteroids[/i]: you move your ship around in two-dimensional space clearing level after level of enemies. Your main weapon is a plasma cannon that you’ll be spamming for most of the game, but you can temporarily acquire honing missiles and explosive plasma projectiles that are both marginally more useful. At a small cost of your ship’s health, you can also destroy enemies by ramming into them. Most of the enemies are the same large drones that slowly float either straight toward you or straight towards the ground to steal tomatoes, and occasionally you encounter smaller drones that are harder to hit. None of the foes has a ranged attack, and none of them has any evasive maneuvers like zigzagging or whatnot (unless you count getting stuck behind geometry as an evasive maneuver). They just float either slowly towards you or slowly from the sky to the ground to the sky again. This makes the gameplay boringly easy. If that sounds dull to you, imagine doing hardly anything but slowly annihilating dozens of these foes, level after level, for [b]three and a half hours.[/b] This is, by far, the game’s biggest issue: it is too repetitive to be entertaining for more than umpteen minutes at a time. To make matters even worse, you have to clear a level all over again if your ship explodes, which can easily happen if you mistake any geometry for background décor. To be fair, the designers did try to break up the monotony, but the problem is that these adjustments are all much too minor and much too sporadic to keep the experience fresh and engaging. For a while you have to keep the drones from stealing tomatoes, and eventually you only have to worry about ’em going after you. Occasionally you have to destroy a structure to finish a level, at times in somewhat labyrinthine complexes, then you return to destroying wave after wave of slowly moving drones who steadily spawn into the area, a chore punctuated by refueling your ship. The last several maps are anticlimactic: the designers simply increased the variety and number of enemies that you have to destroy, and I’m sad to say that they are as exciting as this game gets. The sound consists of generic cartoon sound effects coupled with [i]SPY Fox[/i] voice actors who periodically interrupt the tedium to deliver some mostly uninteresting lines. At one point Mike Medeoy [sic!] made me laugh out loud by delivering a panicky line with a dull performance, but for the most part the voice acting is average and unremarkable. The music is competent and fits the theme, but it is also very forgettable and limited to only a handful of tracks. The graphics are, I guess, [i]Hold the Mustard[/i]’s strong suit: you get a decent variety of environments and the style in general is the same cartoony aesthetic that you’ll recognize from other entries in this series. On the other hand, the interface, the ship, and many of the other models are so utterly lacking in detail that they look as if somebody drew them in MS Paint. The artists put much more detail into the elements on the ground — which you’ll be trying to avoid most of the time. The backgrounds are mostly unremarkable, but as I said earlier, sometimes it’s unclear what’s background and what isn’t, which for careless players can add frustration to an otherwise boring campaign. [i]Hold the Mustard[/i] is not offensively awful, but it is still too tedious and too unrewarding to be worth your time. If you like the setting, you would be better off watching a longplay. If you [b]need[/b] to collect it, though, get it as part of either the Spy Fox Complete Pack or the Humongous Entertainment Complete Pack, because even on sale, it is not worth getting on its own.

I love it! It is a fun old game, I am glad I bought it. Me and my 2 year old daughter have been having a blast!

This is another arcade title so don't expect a point and click game. Other than that this is a decent game. A little tedious but really nothing so terrible or great about it.

no more mustard