Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Piranha Plant

First appearance: Super Mario Bros.

Relatives and variants: Venus Fire Trap, Jumping Piranha Plant, Petey Piranha

Special characteristics: fire is a strength and a weakness, boasts sharp teeth most plants don't have

Piranha: The bane of the plumbing industry. Imagine you're just the usual fat Italian man, sporting a mustache that rivals Tom Selleck's and outrageously red overalls, and you're trying to make a living cleaning out people's huge green pipes. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Well, suddenly one of these freakshow Piranha jobs comes hauling out of a pipe baring its teeth and hacking up all kinds of fire. You can really only do one of two things--get closer to it (Piranha Plants get stage fright when surrounded) or, perhaps more obviously, eat a power flower and throw fire back at it. Your first tendency will be to douse it with water to counteract the flames, but resist that impulse and just torch the thing. When the plant burns up it will yield a single coin which, collected en masse, will allow you to cheat death.

23/07/08