Springy Spores
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You're a character in a video game, and you need to climb up a cliff. However, you have no climbing or Le Parkour skills whatsoever. You have no trampolines, jetpacks, Grappling Hook Pistols or flying animals. So what do you do? Find a mushroom. They are spongy, flexible and a little bouncy, sure jumping on them can bring you an extra impulse!
Who needs a trampoline when you've got fungus! |
In short, mushrooms in video games can be used as trampolines and springboards, as game designers extrapolate the spongy texture of most mushrooms to those of mattresses and conclude it can be a reasonable substitute in the wild. An Acceptable Break From Reality.
There are some non-video game examples, more so in Western Animation. They may be homages to video games, such as in Sonic adaptations.
Video Games
- The Trope Namer is the Springy Spores level from Donkey Kong Country Returns.
- There are some mushrooms to bounce on in Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One.
- Fungi Forest's mushrooms in Donkey Kong 64.
- There's only one mushroom in Dizzy The Adventurer, and it serves this purpose.
- In Sly 2, in Rajan's second level, there are mushrooms you can bounce on.
- Found in Eternal Daughter. There, however, are also fake ones that bite you.
- A track in Mario Kart Wii has mushrooms you can bounce on. Some of the levels from New Super Mario Bros. and New Super Mario Bros. Wii also feature this.
- Sonic and Knuckles has giant bouncy mushrooms in Mushroom Hill Zone. Meanwhile,Sonic Rush Adventure has giant bouncy mushrooms in Plant Kingdom.
- Alice: Madness Returns has the "Amanita Muscaria" within Wonderland of different cosmetic varieties that rigidly shoots Alice upwards almost vertically regardless of the angle of landing onto the mushroom.
- The Forbidden Forest in LEGO Harry Potter has them.
- In the Madagascar game, there was a minigame where you had to jump on mushrooms in a certain order. they were bouncy. In the same game, Alex was chasing you in a level, and he would bounce up and down on a mushroom hoping to get you.
- Seen in The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, if only at the end of the shrinking animation on tree stumps.
- Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2.[context?]
- There was a Sega Genesis game called The Aquatic Games that was part of the James Pond series. It had a variant of this involving sea sponges used in a gymnastics level.
- The Flash game Nelly.
- The blue mushrooms in Rayman Legends are particularly springy, launching the players into new sections of the level either in the background plane, or many screen heights above.
- Songbird Symphony features these throughout the game. Birb can use them to access higher platforms or backtrack if he gets stuck.
Western Animation
- One early episode of Dragon Tales had the dragons showing Emmy and Max a patch of mushrooms where you can bounce on them, and they play music. They're equivalent to trampolines. Ord and Max manage to tap out "Shave and a Haircut".