Poison Mushroom

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Unlike most mushrooms you find on the ground, you shouldn't eat this.
  1. All fungi are edible.
  2. Some fungi are not edible more than once.
-Ember.

An item which harms the player who picks it up or uses it instead of helping them. Differs from Power Up Letdown in that the harm it causes is direct and intentional, rather than from a design flaw.

So, if it's harmful, why would anyone pick it up or use it? Players don't mean to, but poison mushrooms have three main ways of getting around that:

  1. Sometimes they just wait in strategic locations for hapless players to stumble into them, in which case they serve as an obstacle to be avoided.
  2. Other times, they try to look similar to a beneficial item to trick a player into taking it. Beneficial and harmful items may differ only in color, which hurts players with poor color vision or a monochrome display.
  3. It could also be an item that has random effects, some of which are negative.

Whatever their method, it's a Power Up that powers you down instead. Contrast with Chest Monster, which is a monster that disguises itself as a Power Up or other item, and Powerup Letdown, which is a Power Up with positive effects, just not positive enough to be useful.

Not to be confused with a very large mushroom that is even more deadly.

Contents

Game Examples

Action Adventure

  • Several games in the Castlevania series had, alongside the usual food items used to restore health, several rotten food items like "Rotten Meat" and "Spoiled Milk". In Dawn Of Sorrow, equipping a Ghoul soul allowed Soma to eat them safely. After which, against logic, they would heal full heath- apparently, to a ghoul, spoiled milk is more nutritious than an entire turkey is to a human.
  • The Legend Of Zelda
    • The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass features "Rupoors", which would somehow reduce the number of Rupees Link is currently carrying when found. A minor key version of the series' trademark ItemGet fanfare would play when a Rupoor was found, complete with Link holding the item above his head but looking none too pleased about it. One area in the game consists of a maze with Rupoors for walls, requiring Link to walk carefully to avoid them. They also appeared in Four Swords, though rather than directly taking away your Rupees, they made you drop them (allowing other players to steal them).
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has Purple Chus, which leave behind Purple Chu Jelly when killed. Other types of Chu Jelly are very useful, either restoring a good amount of health or as a Lantern Oil substitute, so Purple Jelly should have a good effect too, right? Wrong; while they can heal a random amount of Hearts, they can also hurt you, even taking you down to one Heart. The Nasty Soup, which can be gotten where you get the Lantern, has the same effect.
      • However, since the purple chu cannot outright kill you, it is best used while low on health so if you get the negative effects, nothing will happen.
    • The Legend Of Zelda Ocarina Of Time and The Legend Of Zelda Majoras Mask: The Poes have the same effect when consumed.
  • In Cave Story, equipping the Nemesis weapon essentially turns experience crystals into this. At level 1, the Nemesis is a powerful weapon. Collecting 1 EXP will level it "up" to level 2: a weaker Nemesis with shorter range and less damage. Collecting 1 more EXP will bring it to level 3: rubber ducks with short range that do 1 HP of damage.
  • The Superman game for the NES had this in the form of green and red Kryptonite, which sapped your energy instead of giving it like the blue power crystals.
  • Luigi's Mansion's minibosses tossed one of these when they hit low hp. Since they bounce randomly and cut off your vacuum, they'd prevent good runs if you were unlucky.

Action Game

  • The Bomberman series has the Skull item, which, when picked up, will temporarily give the player a randomly chosen negative effect, such as inability to drop bombs, slow motion, invisibility (worse than you might think), and a few others. There is a small silver lining, however; you can share the effects of the Skull item with another player by touching him or her.
    • Though this is VERY dependent on the individual game's list of possible effects, getting the skull could be a GOOD thing. In Bomberman 64, the effects were split 50/50 good to bad, for example, one possible outcome was you would instantly get full power bombs (with blue super sized explosions). Another one set you on fire, making you able to kill anyone by touching them... but you'd have to move quick cause you would burn to death eventually. Another made you absolutely tiny, but super fast.
  • Bomberman 64 and Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! have "Bomb-Down," "Sandal," and "Fire-Down" items, which lower the amount of bombs you can place, your speed, and the blast radius of your bombs. These also occur throughout the multiplayer modes of most Bomberman games.
    • They became useful in one specific section of The Second Attack!" which required the player cross the reactor core of a spaceship. Reducing the Blast Radius to zero was the only way to safely cross the otherwise lethal reactor fluid. At zero radius, ice bombs would not blowback on the player if they were careful.
  • Zombies Ate My Neighbors has the Mystery Potion as a Type 3. Most of its effects are beneficial (mimicking those of Speed Shoes, Red and Blue Potions or First-Aid Kits), but they can also damage you when you drink them. The worst effect, however, is Mr. Hyde, which turns the player briefly into an uncontrollable monster who kills any victims he touches.
  • ROM Check Fail has this in the form of the Space Invaders ship. It cannot move up or down, and can only fire one shot at a time - straight upwards. It is often an instant death sentence for unfortunately positioned players.
  • If you pick up one of these in Ferazel's Wand, it's pretty much your own fault, given that they're black with a skull. They're an instant kill, and are typically buried in soft ground (visibly) as an obstacle to digging.
  • In ancient Atari 2600 game Fast Food, among the delicacies flying at increasingly high speeds towards your disembodied mouth avatar were green pickles and purple pickles. Green pickles were the most valuable food to devour. Purple pickles made you lose a life.
  • In Feeding Frenzy, some of the smallest fish are radioactive and glow yellowish green. In the first game, eating one causes the player's controls stop responding for a brief period, leaving his fish immobile and an easy target for a larger fish. In Feeding Frenzy 2, it's even more disconcerting, since eating one causes the player's controls to operate in reverse.
  • The Tower Of Druaga has the Potion of Energy Drain and the Potion of Death, the latter of which makes the timer run out faster. Also, not picking up the Balance on any of the five floors that have one will turn the item on the next floor into an "Evil" item.

Adventure Game

  • In Gobliiins, many items Dwayne can pick up will harm him and make him lose some of the energy bar. Sometimes, he will deliberately strike himself with the object.
  • An old Addams Family game, Fester's Quest for the NES, had red power downs for your gun and whip, as well as the blue powerups.
  • In Ravenskull, you can't tell the effects of a scroll or potion without trying it out. Some that you can get are a Lightning Strike Scroll that kills you, a Thief Potion that, as its name suggests, empties your inventory of any items you currently hold (including the potion itself!) and an Energy Drain scroll that reduces your health every square you move instead of every ten. For Hundred Percent Completion, you have to use all of these.
  • Space Quest 4 comes from a long series where nearly every item you found had a plot-important use. Yet in this game, early on, you can find a piece of Unstable Ordinance. If you keep it in your inventory while moving to the next zone, you explode and die. Your only option was to put it back where you got it from... for which you received praise and points for doing something smart.
  • In the Super Nintendo version of Dragon's Lair, you can pick up a Shuriken. Basically, when you throw it, it arcs upward and comes back around to hit anyone it didn't already... Including you. That's right: A weapon that can kill you when you use it. Considering you could be on a moving platform with enemies flying around you, and you can only strike downwards, it's pretty much the worst weapon you could have in a game like this.
  • The original Diablo had cursed armor, adding a bit of a gamble when you identified magical items. Cursed armor reduced attributes and didn't sell for much money.

Beat Em Up

  • The old Capcom beat-em-up Tiger Road had you regain health from gourds. Some gourds cost you health instead of restoring it; these could be identified by one feature - they were upside-down.

Driving Game

  • Fake Item Boxes in Mario Kart 64 and beyond do about the same thing as Poison Mushrooms, whereas the normal item boxes are rainbow-colored or bluish and have a "?" while a fake one will be red and have a "¿". Both blocks look exactly the same from a distance (the fake one changing when you get closer), but most players can avoid them by memorizing where real items boxes should appear. The Trope Namer itself appears in the SNES original.
    • The Wii game had a storm cloud item. It floated over your head, charging up lightning. If you didn't give it away by hitting somebody else in time, it would electrocute and shrink you.
      • One small benefit from the storm cloud is a constant speed boost. While the intention of this is to allow players to catch up to another player to pass it off, the boost also lets you drive off track without slowing down, allowing you to take some nice shortcuts especially in the final lap.
  • Carmageddon had Pinball Mode, which caused you to bounce off objects at increased speed, causing thousands of damage in the first game and probably wrecking you instantly in the sequel. The best thing you could do was sit motionlessly and hoping nobody would hit you. There was also Bouncy Bouncy (your car jumps every few seconds), Jelly Suspension (your car wobbles and tips over), Jupiter Gravity (good luck getting uphill), and the second game has a ball and chain that attaches to your car and Ethereal Pedestrians (can't run over them, so you can't get extra time on your clock for 30 seconds - oops). Not to mention the Drugs, Miniature Pedestrians, Turbo Opponents, basic exploding powerups, Hot Rod (speed boost combined with 'wheelie' suspension, great for blasting into a wall at 600 kph), Greased Tires and the various powerups that crumple up your car or make it break in two.
    • Several of these "bad" powerups can be used for good. The ball-and-chain thing isn't practical to use, but powersliding into a group of pedestrians with it is a guaranteed ticket to Ludicrous Gibs land, and you can detach it at will anyway. Hot Rod is a useful on-demand turbo if used in small doses; also, combined with the tires-stick-to-everything powerup, it's a great way to climb walls (it lifts the nose of the car). And Pinball isn't evil just to you - everything in the game starts bouncing around. Send a ped into a group of others and they'll pinball themselves into pulps, or hit an opponent so that you pinball away to safety while they pinball into an obstacle-filled area, and watch them get wrecked in a second or two.
    • The second game lets you buy any car you wrecked in a race. This is a good thing unless you end up buying a bad car, wasting all of your money and being worse off. Hint: almost everything you could buy in the early game is worse than your starting car. This becomes a problem near the end, where you need something very heavy to kill your opponents (who at that point are driving enormous logging trucks and buses with rocket engines) but almost all of the heavy vehicles are either insanely slow, have terrible driveability, get stuck under or between scenery all the time or all of the above. Then there are the racing missions which have the opposite problem: you need to figure out which cars have high speed and good handling.

Fighting Game

  • In Super Smash Bros Melee and Brawl, Super Mushrooms made your character grow, while Poison Mushrooms made you shrink. The latter could be identified from the former by a slightly darker color and a slightly meaner expression, with the outer corners of the Poison Mushroom's eyes turned upward rather than downward. However, this difference may not be obvious when the camera is zoomed out enough.
    • In Melee both mushrooms turn into question marks when you pause, meaning you can't "cheat" to identify them either.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy has Summon Stones you can equip on your fighters which have various effects when activated. However, a couple of the more nostalgic characters have type 3 effects.
    • The Chocobo runs across the screen randomly jumbling each digit in both your own and your enemy's brave meter, which often results in both players getting either a massive boost or a royal screw-over.
    • The Moogle summon will randomly select an ability from any other summon in the game, which, coupled with poor timing, can result in the player getting hosed by a usually-beneficial effect (like Alexander's bravery-freeze when your brave is at or near 0).
    • When Gilgamesh is called, he will either use Excalibur to triple your bravery, or Excalipoor to reduce your brave to 1. "I feel so betrayed..."
  • Some Samurai Shodown games have items landing into the battle, sometimes they drop food, and sometimes bombs. Even the food is not always a good item because of the random amount of life-recover and the risk of being hit with ridiculous high damage.

First Person Shooter

  • Deus Ex lets you smoke and drink booze. Smoking whittles away at your health, while the booze blurs your screen and sways your view for a time. While nothing forces the player to try either booze or cigarettes, the assumption that these droppable items must have some actual use may draw naive souls in...
    • If you're hurt, you can find a safe spot, down beer, wine and/or liquor, and recover some health (it works like any other food item), and just wait for the effects of blurred vision and swaying screen to go away (it's also explained that your nano-machines make you go through the effects of drunkenness much faster than a normal human as well).
    • Similarly, System Shock 2 features various alcoholic beverages and cigarettes aboard the ships. The booze would mildly heal you at the cost of some of your psychic power points, and cigarettes would simply take a point off of your HP.
    • And in Bio Shock, you can eat and drink all sorts of food items lying around. Drinking alcohol restores HP at the cost of EVE, and if you drink too much, you get drunk and the screen blurs for a little while.
  • Rise of the Triad has the Shrooms Mode powerdown and the annoying (and depending on where it's located, potentially deadly) Elasto Mode powerup. Shrooms Mode makes shooting straight virtually impossible (and will probably make you feel a bit sick). Elasto Mode makes you bounce off solid objects and drastically reduces your friction with the ground. Given all the hazards in the game, you don't want to wind up picking up an Elasto Mode powerup in a large number of the areas in the game.
    • One of the secret levels only reachable via warp cheats includes large rooms full of the Shrooms powerdown, floors filled with bounce pads and little else. It is aptly named the Vomitorium.
  • Pathways Into Darkness has the poisonous Brown Potion that causes you to lose health until you consume a rare blue potion, an Alien Artifact that you need to open the exit also drains your health unless you put it in the Lead Box, and a red cape that essentially gives you a reverse bullet time effect. The kicker? Using all of these items is required to complete the game.
  • In Trouble In Terrorist Town, Detectives can buy Health Stations that can heal other players when they use it. The traitors, on the other hand, can buy a Fake Health Station which looks exactly like a normal Health Station, except it explodes when an unsuspecting innocent tries to use it.

Four X

Hack And Slash

  • The various Gauntlet games have poison and Death hiding in treasure chests identical to food and potion chests. It's impossible to tell which is which without opening them. Gauntlet II had poisoned cider and poisoned blue potions. Shooting either of them would cause enemies to slow down.
    • The upgraded Gauntlet: Legends and its sequel, Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, avert this somewhat with the X-Ray Glasses power-up, which allow you to see what the chest contains; even without the Glasses, observant players will quickly notice that if a chest is shaking and jumping, it very likely contains Death. In any case, each chest location holds the same type of power-up every time, allowing the wise player to avoid opening harmful or useless chests on replay.

MMORPGs

  • Kingdom Of Loathing has a series of potions that are a clear reference to these sorts of items. Their effects are mapped to specific potions differently for each person and each ascension, so they're risky until you've got them mapped out - especially if you hit the one that increases drunkenness while you're one point away from your limit (which makes you unable to continue adventuring) and have more than the rollover cap worth of adventures left.
    • It also has "goofballs". It enhances your skills for a 10 turns, after which it penalizes your character by weakening him for the next 100 turns ("goofball withdrawal"). Only way to avert the penalty? Take more goofballs. And the price of the goofballs? First one's free. Subsequent ones ramp up in price exponentially. And subsequent consumption also causes lost of stat to boot. The moral? Drugs Are Bad.
    • Likewise, food and booze of particularly low quality may damage your stats upon consumption.
  • Drugs in Achaea include cactus weed, gleam, alcohol and tobacco. Effects range from slurred speech and nausea to crippling withdrawal symptoms, distracting or disturbing hallucinations, and death from overdose.
  • World Of Warcraft has the Crystal of Zin-Malor that some players have actually found a use for (despite the fact it constantly damages you if you have it equipped) as opposed to turning it in for a quest.
    • Inverted with one boss who spawns poisonous mushrooms that must be destroyed before they kill you, but hiding among them are mushrooms that will dispel a powerful debuff he places on the tank. If the person clearing away the deadly mushrooms gets overzealous, they can easily destroy the helpful mushrooms by accident.
    • The alcoholic items actually get you drunk. Your screen becomes blurry, you sway to one side, and you see enemies as lower level than they actually are, simulating the lack of fear that drunk people often have in dangerous situations.
  • The laboratory maps in City Of Heroes and City Of Villains sometimes feature lab equipment, that when destroyed, will bestow a random temporary status change on you. It can be a good one (increased regeneration, recovery, recharge rate, damage) or a bad one (decreased regeneration, recovery, recharge rate, damage, or just damages you outright). As the duration is several minutes and the bad ones can be debilitating, many players don't take the risk and just leave them alone.
    • The bad effects need to actually "hit" the player, while the good ones always hit, so increasing your Defense by any means before destroying a lab will allow you to get only positive effects, unless you are really unlucky. Also, the good effects last longer than the negative ones.
  • In Runescape, there is a classic scam of taking a special sort of fish (the ONLY kind you can cook half-way), and having you cook it. You might think that it is completely cooked, but it isn't (it's cooked half-way, remember?), and eating it damages you for 30-50 Hit Points, maximum 99, and poisons you to the tune of 13 Hit Points every ten seconds. Needless to say, you are screwed if you eat it, especially if you're in the middle of nowhere. On top of that, the only hint of the fish's harmful effects is the description "This fish looks rather dodgy", but when you're low on health, the last thing on your mind would be to read the descriptions of every item you have. Finally, the fish is one of the few of its kind in-game, so there's no reason to assume it would kill you.
  • Final Fantasy XI has several variations of poison potions and similar items. Using them afflicts you with a status debuff. More useful than you might think actually, because having a status effect already overrides you acquiring another of the same type, even if it is stronger. Even better, most types of Sleep are completely useless when you are Poisoned, because the DOT you have will immediately wake you up and help save you from a potentially more lethal attack.
  • The Assassin Cross class in Ragnarok Online can, with a certain skill, mix bottles of Deadly Poison, drinking which will poison but also buff them, but a character of any other class will die on the spot when drinking this.
  • Billy Vs SNAKEMAN: Grind Core by CiCi.
  • Ultima Online: The exploding toadstools.

Party Game

  • Likewise, the Mario Party series used to have Black Stars (called Ztars in Mario Party 5) which would reduce your number of stars. Bowser loves giving these out. Extra points if you actually paid for them.

Platform Game

  • The Trope Namer here is the Poison Mushroom from the SuperMarioBros series, a subtle PaletteSwap of the iconic Super Mushroom. They first appeared in the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (known in the United States as The Lost Levels), where picking one up was the same as touching an enemy.
    • The SNES release of "The Lost Levels" made the poison mushrooms a completely and totally unmistakable solid purple with a skull on the cap of the mushroom and gave them angry eyes. If you still picked one of these up, you deserved it.
    • Subsequent remake on the Game Boy Color, Super Mario Bros Deluxe, retained the skull cap.
    • The Lost Levels also has backwards warp zones.
    • In many Super Mario World rom hacks a level gimmick might be the green orbs that complete the level scattered about. However they will be placed in areas were touching them will result in Mario falling off the screen. You either have to avoid them or use a item (P-switch) to block a gap to complete these levels.
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles had the "Robotnik" item, which acted like taking an attack from an enemy if its monitor was opened. These first appear in Act 2 of the Hydrocity Zone, but are easily missed. Later they appear in the Ice Cap zone, where they used the "obstacle" approach.
    • They also appeared in the 2-Player mode in Sonic 2. Particularly evil given that the monitors in 2-Player mode display static until you hit them and find out what they contain.
      • In Casino Night Zone, if you get three Robotniks on a slot machine, you lose strike:all your 100 rings.
    • Hacking also reveals that Robotnik monitors existed in Sonic The Hedgehog (1). They aren't programmed to actually do any damage if you hack one in and break it, but one can assume that they would have if they were actually implemented.
  • Toejam and Earl had these in two ways. First was the food that you could pick up to recover energy. Good food included bacon & eggs, cake, and fudge sundaes. Among this good food is bad food, like moldy cheese and fish bones (and a few which look innocuous at first, like the lettuce, which turns out to be old). These would cause you to LOSE energy. The game was also scattered with gift-wrapped presents -- their contents are at first a mystery, but opening a present (or consulting a wise-man in a carrot suit) will identify all presents which have the same wrapping paper. The presents were mostly good, like weapons, 'vehicles', food and money. Others were not so nice -- instant death, bad food, a sleep spell, or the infamous Randomizer, which makes you start the identification process all over again.
  • The poison potions in Prince Of Persia looked almost exactly like the regular potions (they had blue bubbles instead of red -- a detail that could be difficult to make out in the console versions if you had a small TV, and easy to miss in general) but hurt you instead of restoring or increasing health.
    • Both of the original games also had a green potion that flipped the screen and reversed your controls. To reverse the effect, you had to find the other potion of the same kind.
    • The Super Nintendo version of the original Prince Of Persia had new traps, new enemies and Boss Battles, and redesigned or completely new levels. One of the all-new levels had a room with two large potions: the typical life-upgrade potion, and a potion that instantly killed you. Same level had innocent-looking sparkly things that instantly vaporized you if you touched them.
  • The "Fat Head" power up from Dynamite Headdy. It's occasionally mixed in with other powers in a power-up box, and if you accidentally pick it up, Headdy gets stuck with an over-sized head that forces him to move slowly and prevents him from jumping for several seconds. Fortunately, you seldom encounter it in a location swarming with enemies, but on the other hand, it occurs in multiple boss battles.
  • Earthworm Jim 2 had a weapon known as the Bubble Gun, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin: It shoots out soap bubbles. Obviously, it's not even remotely useful in trying to defeat enemies. What raises this above a mere Powerup Letdown is that (at least in the Genesis version) there was no way to switch weapons, so you were stuck with the last weapon you picked up until it ran out of ammo. This was a minor annoyance in the first level, where you could just stop and use it up, but a death sentence in the last level, a foot race against Psy-Crow, where you needed a useful weapon to clear away obstacles so you could beat him to the checkpoints. Failing to do so resulted in him closing the gate behind him and triggering an inescapable Death Trap (If you were lucky - if you weren't, a glitch would prevent the Death Trap from firing, leaving you to sit in the now-sealed room until you gave up and reset the system). And even in the versions where you could switch weapons, you usually got the bubble gun at the worst possible moment.
  • Rastan also had poisoned potions, which were red fluid in triangular bottles, as opposed to the safe blue potions in round bottles. While it reduced your vitality by as much as 15%, a red potion also was worth 10,000 points.
  • Crystal Caves has deadly green poison mushrooms appear in a number of levels. Pick one up, and it's a level restart, regardless of how much health you had left. Unfortunately, they're not the only mushrooms in the game which can be picked up (red ones are an actual powerup, and blue ones are worth a lot of points). Also, since it's a simple Platform Game, by "picking up" we mean "touching" or even "brushing against ever so slightly".
  • Late in the game Stinkoman 20X6, you find poison capsules. These deal 1 damage to you and look like the power crunch capsules that restore full health.
  • In the Platform Hell game Syobon Action, you will die if you touch anything that looks like a Super Mario Bros powerup (not only the Poison Mushroom). On the one hand, this means you should take care not to hit certain blocks from underneath, because you'll need to jump on them when they don't have a lethal item sitting on them. On the other hand, some of the game's puzzles are solved by feeding these items to enemies.
  • Legacy Of The Wizard had a poison item that was quite obvious, what with having a skull on it and everything. It would drain some of your life - not that big a deal unless you were badly damaged. The problem is that they're commonly dropped by enemies and can be difficult or impossible to avoid in narrow corridors, forcing you to wait for them to disappear. Graciously, you can walk past them, since the enemies have to plummet offscreen Mario-style before their spoils appear.
  • The "Sleep" ability in Kirby is absolutely useless; it puts Kirby to sleep, without healing him, for approximately 5-10 seconds, leaving you vulnerable to any sort of enemy attacks. Kirby Super Star actually uses the ability as part of a challenge during "The Great Cave Offensive": one room has a number of Sleep powerup spots, a wind blowing towards the entrance, and a treasure at the far end. The trick is to get to the treasure without hitting a Sleep powerup, which will cause Kirby to fall asleep and be blown back to the entrance.
    • The True Arena in Kirby Super Star Ultra always has a pedestal with the Sleep powerup and a pedestal with an actually useful ability, which combined with the 5 tomatoes that barely heal you instead of your precious Maxim Tomatoes just goes to show how Nintendo Hard The True Arena is.
    • Kirby Squeak Squad attempts to give Sleep a modicum of use: once you get the Copy Scroll for the ability, it will restore a small amount of health. Of course, you could just stock up food items in the touch-screen based inventory instead...
    • There is also Kirby Air Ride, where hitting someone would put him asleep too. But you still need a very good luck to hit someone when you can't turn...
  • Yoshi's Story has the peppers, which are similar in size to the fruit your Yoshis need to eat in order to complete the game, and sometimes found in the same bubbles that fruit is often found in. Eating it damages any but the hidden Black and White Yoshis, and even the Black and White Yoshis don't count it as actual fruit (they're just immune to the damage, and it heals them a little.)
  • Eggplants from Adventure Island are a type 2. Like all power-ups, they're hidden inside eggs, so you won't know you're about to open one up until after the ominous-sounding music plays. When you do, your health meter drains three times as fast, leading to a very quick death if you don't eat up quickly.
  • In Super Marisa Land's unlockable "Alice Mode", all of the mushrooms that previously served as power-ups now serve as Poison Mushrooms. All of them. You have to complete the entire game without powering up. At least you have the dolls to throw...
  • In Alex Kidd in Miracle World, some blocks contain a Grim Reaper that homes in on and kills you.
  • The NES platformer Low-G Man has red potion bottles that drain one block of health instead of restoring one block as the blue potions do. In fact, the main attack of one of the stage bosses is to throw these bottles at you.
  • Athena for the original NES really took the cake with this trope. Not only were there bad items that hurt you, but mooks also dropped weapons that automatically replaced your current weapon if you touch them - even if your weapon was in every way better! So your reward for finding/upgrading to a badass weapon? The challenge of mowing down the endless hordes of enemies without gimping yourself!
  • New Super Marisa Land has the blue mushroom, which turns Marisa into a Yukkuri. In this form, she can very easily spin out of control, and whatever form she was in before is lost. Similarly, there's the UFO Suit, which is slow and reverts back to small Marisa after a short time. While these powerups have their uses, they more often than not exist to make life difficult for the player.
    • The World 7 boss, Nue Houjuu, throws powerups at the player. The only problem is, you fight her in mid-air in UFO form, and all other forms will make Marisa plummet to her death. It is entirely possible to catch a Super Mushroom and fall into the boss, killing her in one hit. Good luck actually pulling it off, though...
  • The Lion King: The Bug Hunt BonusStage had black widow spiders scattered everywhere among all the bugs Timon could collect. Touching even one meant instant failure.

Puzzle Game

  • Pacman-like game Zoom! had a question mark powerup, which could randomly give you points, skip you to the next level, or kill you outright.
  • The fairly unimportant '96 Breakout clone named Twinblok had a powerup that temporarily transformed all balls on the field into tennis balls. They turned completely harmless to blocks and the sudden change in their behavior was often lethal, since you were still obligated to keep at least one in play.
    • Another Breakout clone called Mac Brick Out has blocks randomly drop capsules. The majority of the capsules do useful things, such as increase the size of the paddle, allow the ball to stick to the paddle, or giving the player extra balls to juggle. A few, however, would have negative effects, such as shrinking the paddle. And getting too many "paddle expand" capsules would actually cause half of the paddle to break off, so if you're close to the breaking point, even they prove to be Poison Mushrooms.
    • This is common in Breakout-style games that use powerups. One variation, Alpha Bounce, includes the "P" items that do something different depending on which paddle you're using.
  • The objective of BBC Micro Puzzle Game Xor is to collect all the smiling masks. However, there are also frowning masks, which turn off the lights, making the walls invisible until a second frowning mask is collected.

Real Time Strategy

  • The freeware Worms-esque Liero features a weapon called the Booby Trap, which creates land mines disguised as medikits. They could be distinguished from the real thing because they didn't bounce like the real powerups did.
  • Command And Conquer: Red Alert has crates that explode and cause damage when picked up.

Roguelike

  • In Roguelike games like Nethack and Crawl, what the different magic items look like varies from one game to the next, so (for example) in one game a square amulet is an Amulet of Lifesaving, while in the next game a square amulet is a cursed Amulet of Strangulation. Part of mastering the game is developing tactics to discover which items are bad without killing yourself.
    • Nethack also brings us the loadstone, an object which weighs an obscene amount (more than some characters' suits of armor) but if picked up cannot be dropped unless you cast an uncurse spell on it (and it automatically re-curses itself if you pick it up again). Of course, it looks just like two moderately useful other items when unidentified, and magical identification only works on items you're carrying. . .
      • Hint: Leave it on the ground and kick it. Loadstones are too heavy to kick, other "gray stone" items are not.
    • For type 3, Nethack uses actual dungeon elements: the Sink, Fountain, and Throne all have various effects when kicked/quaffed from, quaffed from, and sat upon respectively; most are beneficial, but negative effects are irritatingly common. In the upgrade SLASH'EM, there are also Gypsies, who may cause anything from a free wish to instant death when talked to.
    • PS2 Roguelike [[Baroque] is full of these. You can be injured, killed, or otherwise negatively affected by certain items in your inventory, but in a more direct example of the trope, certain Meta-Beings will drop Disks upon being killed purified. Disks that are visually indistinguishable from any other type of Disk. Disks that might, say, turn your sword into a piece of meat, or explode violently when stepped on. And by the time you encounter these enemies, you've probably gotten into the habit of instinctively picking up everything as soon as it hits the floor.
    • The original Rogue had a Potion of Poison, a hallucinogenic potion, and the infamous "cloak of darkness" potion.
    • In Angband, the items which look different from game to game are rings, amulets, staffs, wands, rods, potions, mushrooms (of course) and scrolls. All of these items exist in beneficial and harmful varieties. There are also cursed weapons and armor with negative bonuses; fortunately, Angband doesn't require the player to wield an item before identifying it. If you do wield a cursed item, it will instantly feel "deathly cold" and cannot be removed easily.

Role Playing Game

  • In the Star Ocean series, item creation often yields items like this, especially to begin with. One particularly annoying example is the Bounced Cheque in Star Ocean: The Second Story, which continually drains your party's money until you get rid of it, which costs money to do since you can't throw items away and its sale value is negative.
  • Fable also lets the player character drink, with approximately the same effect. He'll even throw up if he gets smashed enough.
  • Faxanadu had vials of poison that looked very similar to health potions.
  • Paper Mario lets you equip some badges that have a negative effect on you, allowing you to make the game more challenging if you wish. Unlike the normal badges, they don't require any badge points.
    • It and its sequel also had some recipe items that sometimes had adverse effects (such as negative status or damage). Additionally, in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Mario could get 3 Poison Mushroom cards, which would give him an array of nasty effects.
  • Final Fantasy XII had some equipment that gave godly stat boosts, but the trade off was forever status ailments (depending on what it caused) until you took the item off.
    • These have been around in previous Final Fantasy games. The Thorn Crown (found in 5 and 6) was a very strong headgear but caused a slow loss of Hit Points, the Bone Mail (found in 5) was incredibly powerful armor but made you undead, which made magical healing hurt you instead. Another one was the sword Excalipoor (found in 5, used by a summon in 8) which made all your attacks do only one point of damage. And then there is the Cursed Shield (found in 6) which was very bad, but transformed into an incredibly good shield if you kept it equipped for 255 battles.
  • In Mother 3, there's an item called Fresh Milk that will restore 80 HP, but after only about a minute it turns into Spoiled Milk, which barely recovers anything. However, after about ten or fifteen minutes the Spoiled Milk will turn into Yogurt, restoring the 80 HP-recovery ability.
    • Brave Fencer Musashi also features food items that spoil over time -- including milk that will go bad and then turn into yogurt. In this case, though, the yogurt is only about half as potent as the milk.
    • Played for High Octane Nightmare Fuel on Tanetane Island in Chapter 7. Upon arrival, a Save Frog alerts you that your party is in critical condition, and they are--everyone is down to 1 HP. Also, all of your items are gone. Only way to heal? Go a little bit into the island and eat some suspicious-looking mushrooms. The result? Your party is fully healed... but now you're hallucinating like nobody's business.
  • In Baldurs Gate series, half the unidentified items are actually cursed items, a bottle that looks like a Potion of Mirror eyes (the protects from petrification) may instead turn you into stone, or an obviously magical sword is cursed to put the character in a permament Berserker state. Or the boots of double-speed, Faster then the speed-boots, but causes fatigue and renders the user unable to attack. However, the programmers unintentionally gave a way for savvy players to know what unidentified items are cursed (Hint: even Bards with High Lore can't identify them on the spot)
    • Which is a continuation of the classical cursed items from Dungeons and Dragons such as the Boots of Dancing, or a Dagger of Lycanthrope Sympathy (instead of killing Werewolves good, they're good at attracting them).
      • Classic cursed items in Dungeons And Dragons also included weapons and armor that gave AC and to-hit-and-damage penalties instead of bonuses, such as a -1 sword or a suit of -2 armor. Naturally, once you equipped them, you couldn't take them off or otherwise be rid of them until a mage or cleric could cast a Remove Curse spell on you.
    • The Vampire's Revenge sword from the first game is an especially nasty example. Not only is it cursed, it also does the exact opposite of what a sword is supposed to do. It drains its wielder's health and heals its target. Just to add insult to injury, getting the sword is a case of Guide Dang It which involves fighting a Doomguard, one of the most powerful non-boss enemies in the game, going through one of the most annoying dungeons in the game which is chock-full of respawning Kobold Commandoes packing fire arrows, and forgoing a valuable reward of 1500 exp. Pouring salt into the wound, the sword's flavor text mocks you for going through all of that trouble to get a piece of cursed junk like this.
  • The World Ends With You brings us the Red Skull pin, which slows down Neku's movement in battle. What the hell is the point of this pin, and why can't we sell it? Well, one mission revolves around making this pin the next big thing, and to make it so you have to wear it in battle until the Gatito brand becomes #1 on the Scramble Crossing trend charts. And then plot-wise, this pin has a much worse effect: during Kitaniji's super happy fun brainwashing time, anyone wearing it but not the black Player Pin goes into "To right the countless wrongs of our day" mode.
    • It also has an unintentional amusing Good Bad Bug use: by equipping it and then getting swarmed by tadpole enemies that also slow you down, Neku's speed loops around to negative, causing him moonwalk backwards away from where you point the stylus.
  • In Ys Book I and II, you find an Evil Ring in Darm Tower, which drains your health(or kills you instantly in non-TGCD versions) if you equip it and don't also have the Blue Necklace equipped. It is in fact required to rescue Lair later in the tower. Somewhat of a GuideDangIt.
    • In Ys VI, the Galba Armor inflicts poison status unless you equip the Silver Armlet first.
  • Persona 3 has the Cursed Cards in the post-battle Shuffle minigame. Sure, you get to keep whatever the Card yields like any other time... but Death is summoned to your side almost immediately.
    • Persona 4 has fake chests that, upon opening, "punch" you and drain your HP or SP. Pretty scary if you're not expecting it.
  • The Black Potion in Light Crusader poisons your character, which in this game flip-flops the controls rather than draining health.
  • Similar to the Mother 3 example, many item magnus spoil in Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, resulting in what are usually very poor attack magnus. One particularly devious example, which you might not even see if you go straight to the end of the game as quickly as possible, is Yesterday's Wine. Deluxe Red Wine is a fairly decent healing item (though it gets outclassed later in the game), but after 24 hours (yes, of playing), it becomes Yesterday's Wine, which just gives you a Headache.
    • Oh, and just for bonus points, you need' to get each and every one of these for Hundred Percent Completion. Be careful not to use them by mistake.
  • Pokemon has Effect 3 in the form of an attack, Metronome.
    • In a similar vein, the move Assist, which picks a random attack from any Monf in your party.
    • Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky has Effect 2 inverted as well as played straight with the Lookalike items. The first one you'll likely come across (Oren Berries) does the opposite of what it's supposed to do, but there are a few like the Slip Seed which are beneficial.
      • Unless you throw it at an enemy like what you should do with what it's imitating, the Sleep Seed. That's bad.
  • Golden Sun has many items of cursed equipment; they are often quite powerful, but have the disadvantage that they cannot be removed without visiting a Sanctum, and may randomly cause the wearer to become paralyzed for the duration of a battle (although the latter effect can be mitigated by equipping a rare item).
  • The chests left by defeated enemies in Secret Of Mana may hold helpful supplies and other goodies. Then again they may only contain a booby trap, which can really mess you up. When you get a 'fake chest' which splatters the Girl and the Sprite and sends the Hero screaming like a little girl all the way to the nearest inn, you may decide to stop opening those things.
  • A recurring trope in the Dragon Quest series. Some weapons and armor the later half of the game found in chests are cursed. They're often quite powerful, but in reality, they give you lousy stats and cannot be unequipped unless you remove the curse. You can guess the item is cursed by its appearance and their description does warn you shouldn't try equipping it.
    • The Cursed Belt and the Death Necklace from the first Dragon Quest.
  • The Mac RPG Task Maker has the Skeleton Scroll and Depressions scroll, both of which temporarily deplete some of the player's stats. Devil's Scroll even goes so far as to decrease the overall value of each stat.

Shoot Em Up

  • PSN/Steam shooter Soldner-X: Himmelssturmer has a bonus icon which instantly destroys your ship. In a game already Nintendo Hard and with sharply limited extra lives, its presence is most unwelcome.
  • An old N64 game called Chopper Attack, featured different bonuses if you blew up a certain base. These bonuses were random, sometimes giving health or ammo. Or other times it was a black box that jumped up and exploded in front of you.
  • Parodius features an !?/OH (MY GOD)! "powerup" on the power meter, which nullifies every powerup you have. Well, "It's hardly worth being called a power up".
    • Normally, it's simple to avoid; just don't power up when it's highlighted. But throw in the "powerup roulette" feature that activates by random (though actually specific) power pods, and you'll see its true purpose.
      • Thankfully in Jikkyo Oshaberi Parodius: Forever With Me featured an option to change the !? into a slot machine roulette, which not only reduces greatly the chances of getting that dreadful powerup, but also rewards you with upgraded versions of the bell powerups in the game, and also extra lives.
      • On more positive side, the funny voiceover shouts the words "OH MY GOD!!" loudly at Gokujyo Parodius, which truly shows the alarmed and frustrated feeling you get from that powerup, but for some it might sound little amusing. Sexy Parodius even gives every playable character their own shocked exclamations reacting to the selection of !?-powerup.
  • Warblade has a number of them:
    • Skull powerups occur in red, green, and blue. They downgrade your weapon, as well as your speed, bullet count, and time stats. There are positive effects too, which lower the number of further bad powerups. The red, green, and blue varieties are all the same, except that if you collect a certain number you get a benefit:
      • Money thieves occur from time to time. If you get three blue ones, the money thieved explode into even more money when killed than they normally do.
      • Three green ones causes a multiplier to spawn at the beginning of meteorstorms, one of the more common bonus rounds.
      • Three red skulls will cause a gem counter to be added to the interface. you can make it permanent by playing 5000 levels total, though that may be overkill for such a minor detail.
      • A red, then green, then blue in order drastically upgrades your speed, and will also upgrade your weapon to super triple if it's lower than that.
    • Far worse than skulls are weapon powerups, which can change your weapon to either single(you will lose if you pick up this one past level XX25(they cycle, every 100th level is the same but a bit faster)), double, triple(the normal kind, not super triple) or quadruple(this one's kind of rare, and doesn't suck so much). There isn't much of a problem on undeveloped accounts(in this game, achievements unlock significant, permanent bonuses) but on higher levels and/or highly developed accounts, this can suck because your weapons are far better than those. Heck, some achievements allow you to START OUT with quadruple or super triple.
    • Less detrimental here, but if you pick up a money doubler if you have more than around 450000 dollars, you get red text saying "money doubler malfunction"
  • Some shmups, such as SNK's Alpha Mission, have "power down" items, in this game, the item's letter was reversed.

Simulation Game

  • In Lost In Blue, there are eight different kinds of mushrooms that you can find. Their effects differ from game to game; some will burn your throat and thus make your thirst meter go down faster, some will keep your energy meter from going down, some will induce stomachaches, and some will do nothing.

Stealth Based Game

  • In the original Metal Gear, the cigarettes kill you.
    • Unless you use them at the end of the game, which somehow increases the Timed Mission timer.
    • The snake that eats your rations in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
    • When you recover your inventory after being tortured in the first MGS, it has a Time Bomb in it that you must discard before it explodes. Another bomb can be picked up while searching for the keycard in the drainage ditch.
      • This is a carryover from the original Metal Gear. When you recovered your inventory after being captured then, a transponder is hidden in your equipment. Until you noticed and discarded it, enemies would be waiting for you at each new screen you entered.
  • Inverted to a degree in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. If The Fear is damaged enough, he will retreat from attacking you to find any Rations or Food around the battlefield, to heal himself. If you collect all of them and plant a Poisonous item, he will eat it without a second thought, further hurting his Stamina. Excellent for those trying to do Stamina-defeats on the bosses.
  • Rise Of The Kasai features an inversion of this trope. Tati can find literal poison mushroom pick ups and use them as weapons by planting them on the ground as mine traps for her enemies to step on, causing them to explode into a cloud of poison gas. It is played a bit straight though, as these mushrooms can prove lethal to the player and their AI partner, being the only player controlled weapon that can do so.

Survival Horror

  • The Whiskey in Alone In Th eDark 2 will mess you up big time (and make the game [[Unwinnable}]] if you drink it. Instead, you have to give it to a certain guy to obtain a Santa Suit, which is critical for entering the house without arousing suspicion (Guide Dang It).
    • "Fragments from the Book of Abdul" and "De Vermis Mysteriis" in the first game. The first book drains your health, the second kills you immediately unless you read them while standing on a very specific spot in a secret room.
  • The Rotten Egg in Resident Evil 5 takes off a large amount of health, but throwing it deals a One Hit Kill to Majini.

Third Person Shooter

  • In the third-person shooter Wild Guns there's the Mystery Power-Up (a bullet with a "?" next to it). While you can still get every gun in the game (Shot Gun, Grenade Gun and Machine Gun), woe onto you if you get the dreadful Pea Shooter, which doesn't do any harm to your enemies and which you must discharge completely before you can switch back to your standard infinite-ammoed gun.

Turn Based Strategy

  • Heroes Of Might And Magic 2 had the Tax Lien (Makes you lose gold every day), the Hideous Mask (Monsters will never join you), and the Fizbin of Misfortune (Ruins your morale). You can see them on the map and avoid them, but sometimes you'd find them in treasure chests with no warning.
    • The Fizbin is at least as old as Might And Magic 3 (not the "Heroes of" strategy series, but the apparently-lesser-known RPGs), where it doubled shop prices. It also eradicated you in the Slithercult Saloon if you had it in your inventory and tried one of the slot machines. However, with it you can take a treasure hoard you couldn't otherwise.
    • Getting rid of a bad artifact in HOMM2 was easy though. Just recruit a new hero, give him the artifacts and then dismiss him. (Removing him from the game). Did not work in HOMM I, though, giving you a message saying "this item can not be traded".
  • Delve Deep: Relics may turn out to be bogus and cost you points when you hand them in.

Wide Open Sandbox

  • In the game Way Of The Samurai 2, the rice ball restores 200 HP, the rotten rice ball costs you 200 (it can't kill you, but it does come very unpleasant in the middle of a heated battle). The difference? Color and description, but who would read it in a battle? Furthermore, most thugs drop this and the real variety. The safer alternative is to just go for better health item, such as the (so-described non-perishable) dried fish, yum.
  • Bully features a game-within-a-game called Consumo, where the character attempts to become larger by eating the random food objects that fly across the screen. Eating rotten food objects such as spoiled rice, fish bones, or apple cores will cause the character to become sick and lose health or even lives.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City allows you to take drugs (large floating discs similar to health pickups and bribes, except bearing an image of a pill), which temporarily slow you down until you get into a vehicle or go to a different area. In some cases, you might take corrosive damage and most likely die.
    • These are in fact adrenaline pills. The "slowing down" is actually Bullet Time, and during this you get super strength (just try punching someone and see what happens...)
  • The 2005 remake of Narc also has a few somewhat useless drugs, Ludes reveals which persons are enemies and which ones aren't, another drug just zooms in and shows you close-ups of enemies for a few seconds, and Weed just slows you down, and your character will get addictions from all of them, though they're less severe than the addictions you get form the more useful drugs like Crack and Ecstasy.
  • The racing game Re-Volt has a "bomb" powerup; if you're unlucky enough to pick this up, your RC car turns black, its antenna becomes a fuse and it explodes after a few seconds (not destroying it, but sending it flying). Touching another car "gives" the bomb to them, though, so it's a lot like a game of "hot potato".

Non-video game examples:

Animation

  • One Piece has Luffy landing on a deserted island, finding a field of mushrooms and eating them all - each with effect on one's personality, think of laughing gas taken Up To Eleven. One type of mushroom finally gets to him, the one that uses its victim to grow from him. Fortunately for him, he gets rescued by the Amazon Brigade, but as One Piece has taught us up to that point, It Gets Worse.
    • More in the spirit of this trope are the titular Devil Fruits themselves. They range from incredible, almost flawless Power Ups to being close to useless (while losing the power to swim, something essential in a basically sea world) to this trope, as Rob Lucci puts it, "that can ruin your life", and/or make you feared as a monster with little to none benefits.
  • Spoofed in Fairy Tail, where Happy says it's Natsu's character gag. Natsu vehemently denies being that stupid to not be careful... while with a stuffed mouth of random mushrooms. Ironically Happy eats one of the most apparently normal looking mushroom and has the exact same thing happen to it - i.e. has a mushroom grow on its head.

Fan Works

  • Game Over has SC turning into a Pokémon, his trademark black Poison Mushroom shirt turns into a black kerchief with a Poison Mushroom decal tied around his neck.

Gamebooks

  • In the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks the hero can gather quite a few items; some useful, others not so much. And then there are the items that will make Lone Wolf's adventure harder down the line (or outright kill him) if he was dumb enough to pick them up. These items usually have very evil sounding names to warn the player that they're better off leaving them alone. One of the earliest examples in the series is the Glowing Crystal from Book 3 which is actually one of the Doomstones. Ironically enough, due to Dever's attempts to make the series more balanced, the Sommerswerd can act like a Poison Mushroom; making Lone Wolf's life harder than it would be if he didn't bring it with him (especially in Books 9 and 11).

Tabletop RPGs

  • Dungeons And Dragons: Several campaigns feature poison found in a treasure haul, in addition to your regular potions. Characters that drank it suffered anything from hit point damage to outright death if they failed their saving throw.
    • Classic cursed items in D&D included weapons and armor that gave AC and to-hit-and-damage penalties instead of bonuses, such as a -1 sword or a suit of -2 armor. Naturally, once you equipped them, you couldn't take them off or otherwise be rid of them until a mage or cleric could cast a Remove Curse, Dispel Evil or other such spell on you. Not to speak of the various other major cursed items you could run across (see BaldursGate above for more examples).

Trading Card Games

  • The Yu Gi Oh Card Game has "Parasite Paracide," which gets inserted into the opponent's deck, face-up. When they draw it, they take damage.

Web Original

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