Basketball (item)

The basketball is an item in Pipe Down! The Mushroom King bought two basketballs for Princess Toadstool's 99th birthday party (her birthday being in "fungus years"), although she dribbles away with one of them while possessed by a pair of sneakers, ignoring the other one. Mario and Luigi can find the second basketball on a set of stairs while Toad leads them to Toadstool's shoe vault, and Luigi carries it under his arm. It can be used if the two of them reach a chamber with three large pipes while lost in Pipe Land. Luigi gets the idea to throw the basketball into the pipes to hear what is inside. When he tosses it into the center pipe, it rattles around the pipe for a short while before it reappears from a side entrance, and he and Mario decide that it has nothing of interest. Luigi then tosses the basketball into the leftmost pipe, and they hear it get chewed to pieces by some monster, leaving them to conclude that they should take the rightmost pipe.