Mini Tangent: Garbage Can Food

From working on Rithum News, I vividly recall a Smash Dojo update which detailed Diddy Kong’s final smash - a maneuver which allows him to make full use of his rocket barrel while dual wielding his peanut popguns. In final smash mode, Diddy’s bullets cause explosions and when it ends, his rocket barrel causes a big explosion.

Most interestingly, though (this should really show how bizarre my mind is), is following the final smash, the popguns leave behind peanuts on the ground that can be eaten to recover health. It’s good to see this long-running and now-forgotten about video game legacy live on. In games today, if we see a barrel, we expect to shoot it and make it explode. However, in the games of old, when we saw a barrel, we expected to punch it open and eat the steaming steak dinner we found inside. It is a known fact that hidden steak dinners replenish a warrior’s health by nearly, if not, 100 percent. Imagine our disappointment when we smashed open a trash can and found the five percent replenishing grape vine.

But it’s not that disgusting if you think about the five-second rule. Sure, the food is conveniently the only item inside of that dumpster you just punched, but it isn’t touching the ground/floor until the dumpster tips over and fades away into oblivion. From that moment, it’s on. Five seconds. And that, my friends, is how we finally make sense of the age-old trend of trash can chickens and eating food you randomly find on the ground. It isn’t on the ground until you force it to the ground, so, thus, it is safe and we can stop making Hot Topic T-shirts about this video game facet.

This doesn't even take into account the games that place your meal on its very own plate for you, keeping it off of the ground. But I would like to see garbage can food make a comeback! When we shoot those red barrels in a first-person shooter, the resulting explosion could cook up a tasty turducken for the player to chow down on. Ok, so maybe not, but at least games like Castle Crashers are bringing ground food back into the limelight. Any game that lets me eat bananas found inside blades of tall grass is a winner in my book.