YMMV / SPY Fox

• Awesome Music: Dry Cereal has the Car Chase, which is a really awesome song but gets mostly drowned out because of all the noise the car makes.
  • There's also the chase music at the start of Operation: Ozone.
• Broken Base: Which English version is better? The Get Smart-styled original or the James Bond-styled British dub?
• Demographically Inappropriate Humour: In Dry Cereal, the number for the Moo Juice headquarters is 8008135 — which spells out "boobies." While it's fitting wordplay given the nature of cow udders, it's nonetheless much crasser than what is expected from a game for young children.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing
  • In Some Assembly Required, Fox has to make a fake ID to get into a restricted area. Before doing so, he reminds the player that only spies can make fake IDs, and even then, only when they're on a case.
  • In Operation: Ozone, he finds agent Roger Boar hiding in a medicine cabinet, but remarks that it's normally not polite to look in other people's medicine cabinets and that he's only doing it because he's a spy on a case.
  • Later in the same game, Fox points out that it's normally a very bad idea to place one's feet into the slots of a toaster (unless it's the SPY Toaster, of course).
• Fridge Horror
  • In an optional conversation with Mr. Udderly after his rescue, he will ask Spy Fox about the fact that he'll be out of his dairy industry job if all the milk is gone. Fox responds by saying that a steer like him could be "worth a lot with the price of beef these days." Who hurt you, Spy Fox?
  • On that note, the dairy industry as it exists in Dry Cereal also qualifies; we know there are sapient cattle from Mr. Udderly's presence, yet the cows we see are milked and kept as property.
  • Poodles Galore's plan to deplete the ozone layer from Operation Ozone has the potential to become mass genocide for those who don't buy her new sunscreen, yet no one seems overly concerned after she says as much.
• Genius Bonus
  • As mentioned under "Punny Name," the Greek island which Dry Cereal is set on is named Acidophilus, named for the bacteria which changes milk into yogurt. Bonus points for its spelling being identical in both Greek and its original Latin.
  • Doll and Lee, the Single-Minded Twins who work the cloning lab in Some Assembly Required, are named after Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Birthday Cake Bombs from Cheese Chase. Nearly a decade before Portal, the cake was STILL a lie.
  • An entire spy network of animal agents? Why does that ring a bell?
    • It rings two, actually.
    • Would you believe, three bells were rung?
  • With ketchup falling out of popularity in The New '10s, one could say King Konglomerate ultimately won in an amazing fashion.
  • The Big Bad in Some Assembly Required is a hammy small green creature who was mocked for his size, wants to take over the world, likes using robots in his evil plans, and owns a restaurant. Wait, are we talking about Le Roach or Plankton?
• Mentor Ship: Spy Fox and Monkey Penny are a rather popular ship among fans.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The short motif that plays when Spy Fox successfully solves a puzzle.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Dummied Out death scene (which is a Shout-Out to the Dragon's Lair games) that was supposed to happen if you used the electric chair in Some Assembly Required. It's both very jarring and oddly dark in tone compared to the rest of the game, which is likely why it was cut.
• Padding: Some have complained that many Hold The Mustard levels (of which there are over 100) veer into this, especially with the wild amounts of Bullet Hell employed in later stages.
• Popular with Furries:
  • The main character is a handsome anthropomorphic fox; it’s inevitable.
  • And of course, his partner is a gorgeous anthropomorphic monkey.
• Polished Port: The Steam re-releases of each game feature a number of under-the-hood improvements allowing them to run better on modern systems, such as the framerate no longer being tied to the processor speed (which is what bungled the earlier Wii port as mentioned below.)
• Porting Disaster: The Wii re-release of Dry Cereal; since it’s effectively just the original game except running on a PC emulator, its much faster hardware-locked framerate made the point-and-click interface a lot harder to use.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer:
  • Each of the minigames from the Spywatch, like "Happy Fun Sub" from "Dry Cereal", "Things From Space", a space shooter minigame in Some Assembly Required, and "Radioactive Trash Collector" Operation Ozone respectively
  • The Go Fish game (whenever you get the Lucky Charm after beating Big Pig or the Car Chase path) from the first game could also qualify.
• That One Level:
  • One of the routes in Dry Cereal forces the player to win a game of "Go Fish" in order to get back the lucky charm that the boat captain lost, which due to said card game being based around the randomness of drawing and guessing cards, who knows how long this will take you.
  • Cheese Chase's Level 75, Carnival of Clouds. It's riddled with narrow pathways that are all one hit kills as well as plenty of cheese that leads to death traps.
  • Also from Cheese Chase: Level 95, "Robo-Snowmen", with lots of narrow pathways and corners, with those blasted robot snowmen smack bang in the middle of the paths, making it almost impossible to get through without the Junior Helper settings ("Go Slower" and "Less Crashes"), and even then, it's super sensitive.
• That One Sidequest: During the White Water path in Dry Cereal, one of the things mandatory is to beat Big Pig at Go Fish. Not only do you have to deal with RNG mechanics, he's very good at playing, so expect frustration to ensue as it can be quite common to be stuck playing Go Fish for awhile if the cards don't go your way. Other puzzles also require a strong understanding of math and telling time, two things younger players might not be as familiar with.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: When Infogrames re-released the first game, the British dub somehow made it over to the States. For some fans who were attached to Bob Zenk's Maxwell Smart-inspired version of Fox, Andrew Wale's more Bond-esque interpretation ruins it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Although Monkey Penny is stated to be just as if not more experienced as a secret agent than Spy Fox, she doesn't leave the Mobile Command Center or take a level in badass until the final cutscene of the final game, defeating Poodles and even saving Spy Fox himself. The credits also reveal several potential Inspector Gadget-like cyborg parts in her paws and tail, enough for an entire other game's worth of Character Development.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Like most Humongous titles, the games’ humor and narrative is largely timeless, but with the somewhat contemporary setting, a few references inevitably wind up being dated.
  • In Dry Cereal, SPY Fox is given some drachmas needed to buy things. It wouldn't be until 5 years after the game was released that the Euro replaced drachmas as Greece's official currency.
  • Along with the Austin Powers movies, these games exist in the waning years of the original campy incarnation of the James Bond franchise and effectively helped end everyone’s ability to ever take the films seriously again. The final game was released just a year before Die Another Day, the very last of the campy Bond films before the series got a Darker and Edgier reboot with the Daniel Craig movies.
  • In Operation Ozone, Fox at one point claims he was preforming the “Limp Biscuit Maneuver”, just in case you needed a reminder that the game released in early 2001…
  • A cutscene in Hold the Mustard has a shut-down screen that has a black background with orange text that reads "It's now safe to shut off the city." This is a clear parody of Windows 95 and 98's "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen, something that already was on its way out when the game first released thanks to the rising dominance of the ATX form factor that rendered this screen obsolete, and is now all but an artifact of mid-90s computing.
    • LeRoach in Some Assembly Required suffers a bug that causes a pop-up to appear, parodying Windows 95's dialog box and infamous frequent crashes.
• Values Resonance: While concern about Earth's atmosphere and climate was certainly not unheard of at the time of its release in 2001, Operation: Ozone's plot seems a lot more topical now that global warming and climate change have become very mainstream issues. It helps that its Green Aesop is fairly subtle (it's mainly about how aerosol is harmful to the ozone), not to mention plot-relevant.

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