Mouse P.I. For Hire: How To Crack The Prize D-Spenser And Keep Your Sanity
Now before you waste a thousand clams trying to play fair against a rigged deck, you need to understand exactly how the economy of the Little & Big bar operates.
Every time I walk across the street from my private investigation office to grab a stiff drink, that locked cabinet sits in the corner and mocks me. The Prize D-Spenser is one of the most obnoxious progression blockers in Mouseburg. If you walk up to the machine, the prompt flatly informs you that you need 20 Prize Tokens to unlock the hardware inside. It sounds simple enough on paper. You just walk to the back of the bar, sit down with the shady rodent running the table, and win a few games of Baseball Cards.
The reality is a grueling, mind numbing grind that will drain your wallet faster than a crooked cop. Mouse P.I. For Hire does not care about your time, and it certainly does not care about your in game bank account. I spent a massive chunk of my playthrough staring at those playing cards, and I am going to teach you exactly how to cheat the system so you can get back to shooting mobsters.
The True Cost Of The Card Game
To get a single Prize Token, you have to win a match of Baseball Cards. A match costs exactly $50 to enter. If you win, you get your token. If you lose, you get absolutely nothing. If you end in a draw, the house still keeps your money.
Do the basic math. Assuming you are a tactical genius who never loses a single hand, you need a bare minimum of $1,000 to purchase the 20 matches required to open the cabinet. But you are going to lose. The Baseball Card minigame heavily relies on random card draws. You can build a fantastic deck by scouring the levels and buying premium packs from the Soup to Nuts shop, but if you draw a terrible hand during the pitching round, you are going to get stomped.
If you are worried about missing your window to grind this out before the point of no return, check my Mouse P.I. For Hire How Long to Beat & Full Mission List to keep your playthrough on track. Do not wait until the final hour to start this process.
The Save Manipulation Strategy
I absolutely refuse to let a random number generator steal my hard earned money. Do not sit at that table and continually dump $50 bills into a losing streak. You need to leverage your save files to rig the house in your favor.
The strategy is incredibly tedious but undeniably effective. First, make sure you have at least $50 in your pocket. Go upstairs to your P.I. Office and interact with the typewriter to create a hard manual save. Run back downstairs, cross the street, enter the Little & Big bar, and challenge the mouse to a game.
If you win, immediately stand up, run back across the street, go upstairs, and save your game at the typewriter again. You have secured your token.
If you lose or draw the match, do not stand up and try again. Pause the game, load your manual save from the typewriter, and walk back over to the bar. You keep your $50, you erase your loss from existence, and you try again. It is a slow, methodical process of running back and forth across the street, but it guarantees you will never waste a single coin on a bad hand.
Claiming The X1 D-Mousifier
Once you finally endure the pain of 20 victories, walk up to the Prize D-Spenser and interact with it. The cabinet pops open and hands over the X1 D-Mousifier. Unlocking this piece of hardware also triggers the "Everybody Loves Rayguns" achievement, which describes the weapon as an exclusive gun manufactured by the Spike-D corporation.
So, is it actually worth the psychological damage of playing a children's card game for three hours?
The short answer is yes. The X1 D-Mousifier is a massive departure from your standard arsenal of shotguns and tommy guns. It is a classic pulp sci-fi raygun that deals a heavy chunk of damage per shot. It visually stands out in the monochromatic world, firing bright energy that cuts through the grim atmosphere of Mouseburg.
The real magic happens when you start investing your collected schematics into upgrading it. Once you push the weapon up to its higher tiers, you unlock a devastating alternate fire mode. Instead of individual blasts, you can hold the trigger to unleash a sustained, steady laser beam. It melts through standard mobsters and is an incredibly efficient tool for burning down boss health bars when you are low on explosive ordinance.
It does not render the Boomstick or the James Gun completely obsolete, but it gives you a highly reliable, high damage fallback plan when things get chaotic. Just remember to pack some patience before you sit down at that card table, and never trust a mouse dealing from the bottom of the deck.
