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Educational, but not effective
I'm throwing this update together at work, so I can't really tidy up or trim the image files. OH WELL.
New attempt, new name pulled out of my ass.
The physical mutation is nothing to write home about, just a passive defensive bonus for the most part. That mental mutation, on the other hand, is pretty great. It lets you disassemble tech items into raw materials, and mash those materials together into new tech items!
You have to actually HAVE a tech item first, of course. I could have smashed up the guaranteed tape recorders, of course, but I chose not to because reasons.
This is a pretty handy berry. It gives you a modest bonus to hit, but it has a more important effect I'll show off later.
Here's an example of a single-use tech item. Instead of <u>sing a grenade-type item, you <t>hrow it like just normal ranged ammunition. Tech items never stack, and inventory space is very limited, so it's not really worth hoarding even the high quality grenades, in my opinion.
This is a much less dangerous cave than that robot hive I killed my last character in! The only real
gimmick of fire ants is that they show up in swarms, but in a cave every monster shows up in swarms, so in here they're just easy kills.
Caves tend to be pretty linear. There's a bit of branching, but no looping; every tunnel eventually leads to a dead-end.
I haven't found any loot at all in here yet, but I'm not concerned. See, there are two types of cave, randomly determined. One type scatters a bunch of loot all over the cave. The other type...
the other type crams all the goodies into a single room! Tech items are VERY likely to appear in caves, making them very worthwhile to loot.
After scooping everything up, I start figuring out the techs, and this is what I find. The microcomputer is pretty amazing, especially for a Scientific Genius character, but I'm going to mostly waste its potential for the sake of showing things off! The LPer's burden.
See, each time you use the computer, it tells you a little something about something. Let's check out some lore!
... hunh. I wonder what that means? 
Tell me something else, magic word box!
Believe it or not, these are useful gameplay tips. Well, let's take a look at something else. Maybe some weapon and armor stats?
Like I said last time, AlphaMan is based on Gamma World, which in turn is based on Original D&D, so these stats should be fairly recognizable, if old school. How about that 1/2 AC value, though, huh? Zany. I have no idea what the point of that is.
The microcomputer only has a finite number of uses, but we picked up a powerpack right next to it, so...
Back in business! Let the learning resume! Maybe some monster stats this time?
As a quick aside here, all of the rest of the spoilers in AlphaMan are readily available on the internet, except for the monsters. The only monster spoilers I can find are a badly formatted usenet post from the stone age. So I'm awfully tempted to set up some savestates or something and just keep scumming the microcomputer to get a full bestiary's worth of screenshots, just for reference. Maybe someday.
In case you were wondering how to food.
This is the real value of microcomputers; if you use it to learn about berries or tech, you permanently get them added to your known items list. This is much, much better than testing berries via your bitey parts.
For a Scientific Genius, this adds to the list of shit you can create out of parts; you have to have an item on your ID list before you can make it. If I weren't trying to show things off, I would have focused entirely on large tech items.
The last few drops of knowledge the computer can offer. If you're keen-eyed enough and I didn't forget to post the necessary screenshots, you might notice that the computer can ID stuff you already know. There's no guarantee you'll learn NEW things.
Oh, and I got this thing, it reduces radiation damage.
Here's Scientific Genius in action taking apart that useless fountain pen for raw parts. It'll take much more stuff before I can build anything, though, so I'll have to come back to that.
Once I got the loot room, there's no reason to explore the rest of the cave. I did anyway.
Mmm, booze. I showed you this use of berries so that I could show you
this use of berries. If you throw some kinds of berries at monsters, it will affect them instead! ... confusing enemies is kind of a niche application, but on the other hand some berries explode or melt with acid.
Why, it's the most annoying effect in any roguelike! What does that "duh" signify?
It signifies your identify list getting ripped to shit. :shakefist:
Hey, another cave! Maggots aren't THAT dangerous, but...
They have a habit of turning into more dangerous flies. Which still aren't a huge deal, but they move erratically, they're hard to hit, they do a little more damage than I want to deal with right now, and just in general fuck this cave, I don't need the stress.
Trying to clear some space back to the stairs. You can see how AoE effects work here. I don't think flies have any particular immunity to photons, but they shrugged the attack right off. 
Invisible enemies! Hey, remember that berry I mentioned way back at the beginning that had another use?
Being keen-eyed lets you see invisible enemies like this chameleon.
From the outside, it looks like one of those ruins I passed up on the other run, but this is a castle, one of the plot-relevant buildings we need to clear out.
This is what ruins/castles look like on the inside. Line of sight is limited to the room you're in, and every square of real estate gets used.
Ah, repair droid, my old nemesis. We meet again.
Ow fuck! Fortunately, monsters tend to lose interest pretty quick when you run away.
I'll just head back to the entrance to rest up and try again.
Oh, you dick. Fine.
Monsters can't follow you into or out of buildings at all, so I just rest out here and head back in. The repair droid's no problem on the second try.
In theory, going from 7 AC to 1 AC is huge. In practice, monsters don't seem to miss much no matter what your AC is. I find it's more reliable to be able to take a punch and burn monsters down before they can kill you. Still, I'll take what help I can get.
Ruins and castles can have stairs leading up or down. Elvis could be on the very top floor (The fifth floor, like it said as we came in) or on the very bottom floor (somewhere in the basement, it doesn't tell you how deep it goes because even mutants don't get magic dirtvision). Since it's a coin toss, I arbitrarily decide to go up.
I don't have any more eyesight berries, but in these close quarters, I don't need them to deal with a chameleon.
Attacks have a chance of damaging your shield or armor. Too many hits, and *poof*
Here's another feature of buildings; traps come in a bunch of varieties. Most of them just do damage, but we'll see fancier traps sooner or later. Traps never affect monsters. They can be disarmed, but there's no reward, so I don't bother if I can walk around.
Hmm, I wonder what kind of monster that d is. (I know what kind of monster it is.)
Oh, god. I've been Geoped.
Dung beetles don't do physical damage, they just exhaust you. Waiting in place will let you catch your breath.
Is... is this useful? Somehow?
No, it is not.
Rosebushes don't have a direct damage attack. Instead, each time they hit you, you are forced to move one space closer to them as your next action.
If you're already next to them, you're forced to melee attack them, and you suffer thorns damage. Once I'm this close, it's next to impossible to get away again. Still, I've hit it a couple times from range already, I've got a decent weapon, and a full HP pool. I'll be fine, right?
See you next time.