Push Button B

Continuing our culinary video game journey, this week I’m going to try an apparent staple of Mario’s diet: Nintendo Mushroom Sours.

They look innocent enough, right? Expressionless eyes staring straight… into your soul! Begging you to rip their caps off and chew on the sweet treats that lie within.

So I did.

Appearance:

The candies look about like you’d expect. Like miniature mushrooms in vaguely the same shape as the containers, but with a little less fidelity. Kind of like when your favorite person is translated into action figure form.

Smell:

I took a whiff of each container and was greeted with… not much, actually. I cheated and took a look at the flavors that were allegedly in these things: the red ones are supposed to be cherry and the green ones apple. But what they really smell like is what you remember apple or cherry-flavored candy would smell like. Muted. Distant. Understated.

Taste & Texture:

With no other option left open to me, I decided to dive in. First was the green one. It tasted faintly like apple-flavored candy, a.k.a. green-flavored. Not too bad, but not too good either, and, in fact, I had to eat two at a time to get enough flavor for my tongue to realize that I wasn’t just eating chips of chalk. Red was pretty much the same story: chalky, bland, and nearly flavorless. To be honest, they seem like they’re little more than just mushroom-shaped Pez.

They’re not bad, but they’re not really great, either. Really, the draw here is that they’re shaped like Mario-universe, and they’re kind of neat to display on your desk or tchotchke shelf or what have you. But that’s about it.