Attackable Pickup

A video game trope: an item which, if attacked with a weapon before being picked up, changes in some way, often (though not always) becoming more useful. Sometimes successfully pulling it off requires dexterity, lest the item be destroyed instead; thus it offers the player a greater reward in exchange for risk.

May count as a very minor Lost Forever, if grabbing the item without shooting it first (something easy to do in the kind of game where you pick up things by touch alone) would deprive you of something very valuable.

A variant is when you can pick up a powerup, or instantly activate its function, by shooting it from a distance without the need to touch it.

Essentially the benign brother of Destroyable Items.

Examples of Attackable Pickup include:

First Person Shooter

• In Rise of the Triad, a Priest Porridge is a minor health pickup. If a missile explodes near the porridge, but not close enough to destroy it, it turns into a "Priest Porridge Hot" which restores more health.
• In Redneck Rampage shooting explosives (which are normally pickups you can carry around and use as weapons) causes them to explode a la Doom barrels.

Hack And Slash

• In Gauntlet Legends, attacking a potion will instantly activate it at the cost of some of its power.
  • This is also true of the original Gauntlet.

Platform Game

• When blasting open the item crates in Duke Nukem II, you can occasionally come upon a live turkey, which restores health when picked up. When shot, it turns into roast turkey, which restores more health.
  • Shooting a can of cola (a minor health pickup) causes it to rocket upwards. If you manage to grab it before it smashes into the ceiling, you get a score bonus (but no health).
  • Duke Nukem I had the same thing as II, except the "live turkeys" were just turkey drumsticks.
• Some levels in Crystal Caves have five eggs scattered throughout. Shooting an egg instead of picking it up turns it into a letter. If all five letters are collected, the player receives a large score bonus. (The uncracked eggs are worth 1000 points each, while the individual letters are just 100 points each without the bonus for all five.)
• In Mega Man ZX any large powerup can be carved into several smaller powerups of different types using a bladed weapon. So if you didn't need all that health or weapon energy, or you just don't care about 64 more E-Crystals at the moment, get out a saber.
• In Bart Simpson in Escape from Camp Deadly, there's a skull in a cave that turns into a Krusty head 1-up if you shoot it. If you touch it while it's still a skull, you die.

Shoot Em Up

• A frequent Shoot'Em Up trope is having item powerups cycle through various items as they are shot.
  • The bells in Twinbee do different things based on color. Shooting them changes their color.
    • Such bells also appear in Parodius.
  • In the scrolling Shoot'Em Up Flying Tigers II, shooting the weapon pickups causes them to cycle through the various weapons.
  • In Capcom's 1942 game series, shooting Power-Up weapons causes them to cycle through various weapon types (and an energy boost).
• In the Retro Game Challenge shooter game "Star Prince" you can activate a Smart Bomb by shooting powerups rather than collecting them.