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Despite my embarassing defeats, I am still not willing to try an easier difficulty setting. Again, name chosen by asspull.


Someone got red splotches all over my map! Heightened vision has some nifty utility. First of all, it marks dangerous radioactive regions on the map. Normally, you have to blunder into them to find which zones are radioactive. Of course, since you can just walk right back out again, they're not THAT dangerous. Heightened vision has a few other effects that we'll see later.

We've already seen the start of the game a couple times, so I'm going to try cutting this down to just the highlights.


Flares are questionably useful. Used outdoors, they illuminate an area around you when it's dark out. Used indoors, you just burn your idiot face.


This is possibly the single most destructive weapon in the game. It does anywhere from 15 to 450 damage to anything it hits, and has the highest chance to hit of all the grenades. It's probably worth saving one of these to take down bosses with.



Not a good berry. Smelling good means that monsters will notice you from further away and come try to get you. As far as I've been able to tell, it doesn't do any good trying to throw these berries at enemies to get them to attack each other. Oh, well!


Here's another benefit of heightened vision; I can see invisible creatures. Don't even need to activate the ability or anything, it's a purely passive power.


It also lets you spot certain traps and hazards that you'd otherwise miss, like this fucking then. If I go and stumble into that, I'll be trapped in the web for a bit, while a newly spawned spider chews on my helpless face. So... I won't do that.



The Halberd is a pretty solid weapon; it's the most powerful melee weapon that isn't Titanium or Duralloy. This game doesn't really track handedness, so I can swing this thing around while holding a shield in the other hand just fine.


I only said that I SHOULD save the grenade, not that I WOULD. These ants are not nearly worth spending such a great grenade on. I did it anyway. Those bugs are proper fucked.



A Venetian, hmm? I wonder what kind of creature that could be...


Oh. Geoped again.

As it turns out, being blinded is NOT one of the things affected by Heightened Vision. On the other hand, Invisibility DOES shorten blindness time, by quite a lot, because something something power over light beams something.



Hello, second best armor in the game! I will miss you when I do something stupid to lose you some time in the future!


Only yellow, which is disappointing. Any future Vornoo berries I will be sure to cultivate as ripe as possible. I swear I will show off proper berry usage sooner or later.


OK, we're back. Let's do this. Hopefully there won't be any rosebushes in here to ruin my day.


After I dump these flares, anyway. No point in carrying them in the building, they'd just waste inventory space.


This is kind of an interesting thing about Alphaman: Creatures with draining attacks don't steal levels or experience, they drain your mutations. Depending on the strength of the attack, they will put your mutations on cooldown for a number of turns. This even disables the passive benefits.


Japanese beetles can steal tech items and disappear, the little bastards, but if you kill them first they have a decent chance of dropping tech items in return.


More useful than it seems! It only works on slimes and molds, but it does good damage and is highly accurate.


All creatures that steal items from you disappear after one theft. Which means they can't take all your stuff, but also means you can't get revenge.


So, since I have no way of knowing if my target is on the highest or lowest floor, I always just take the first stairs I can find. In this case, down we go!


Heightened Vision gives you a good chance of spotting hidden traps and hidden doors with every turn you take. And that's still not everything it does!



Scrub scrub sparkle!


It's not very strong, but it has a large blast radius and can blind the targets. Handy, but not worth saving for a rainy day.


Another enemy that is Gamma World as fuck. I need to reposition, it is impossible to kill Mr. Rickles quickly.


See, his gimmick is that even though he only has 8 hit points, he only takes 1 damage from any attack, and each hit knocks a piece off.




Yes I took two different screenshots that say the same thing, he has two ears, shut up



If I have to wade through every body part, so do you


When he's down to 1 hp, Spuds tries to run the hell away.



For all the good it does him.


Oh sonuvva... At least I can just step out of sight and get away from


No no NO NO NO. I'll just go explore the rest of the level.


Sunflowers shoot lasers at you, just like you'd expect!


Being invisible helps with that. Actually, just having the mutation gives you resistance to laser attacks, but actively turning it on lets me get closer to the sunflower without being attacked as many times, so may as well.



The Dinwog berry makes me drowsy, which is going to be a huge pain in my ass for the rest of this whole castle.


Medkits are must-have items. You can manually use them to heal and to cure poison damage.


Ugh. I've explored the whole level without finding the stairs down, which means I have to get past at least one of those rosebushes. Still, I have a good weapon, great armor, and escape mechanisms. Shouldn't be too hard, right?


Yeah it still got me down to 1/3 health.


At least the stairs are right here.


Keep an eye on that spam can there.


Yeah that ooze just fucking ate it. Jerk.


I'm not sure why I'm testing this berry out when there's a monster right there. This is dumb. Don't do this.


In this case, no harm done. I'll lose track of all the enemies as soon as I take an action, but the rest of the map will remain. This kind of berry is VERY helpful on certain plot-related levels later, so if I find any more I'll save them. Or I'll forgot to. One of the two.


I actually remember to play it safe here. That boa could constrict me, leaving me unable to act while the daffodil shoots lasers at me, which is just another example of how accurately Alphaman models wildlife cooperation.


So I just kill it over here out of sight, where it totally fails to get its constrict attack off anyway.




I can't believe someone just left this laying around. Someone could get hurt. I had better take this with me.

For safety.

Anyway, there's no stairs down here, so I know that my target is actually on the top floor. Time to slog all the way back up.



With a little persistance, you can remove traps. You don't get anything for it, so unless you absolutely can't go around, it's just for convenience.


It's really common for the stairs up and the stairs down to be really close to each other.



Success not guaranteed!



Holy shit! THIS is why you shouldn't eat purple berries you haven't identified. That could have easily killed me.


Yes, thank you, I know.


I was just curious if this would work. It does not.


Wait, what?



Stop that! Remember that berry I ate a while ago that made me drowsy? Yeah, the sandman has come to claim his due. See, there's two kinds of fatigue in Alphaman. There's the normal fatigue that it displays on the screen, where it currently says I'm "Rested". That just measures how winded I am. There's also a secret fatigue that measures how sleepy I am, and apparently I am now so sleepy I will just pass out while this psychic bug eats my brains.


All my brains. Welp, it's been fun guys, but I guess it just wasn't meant to be.


Or not! This is the other amazing use of Medkits: So long as they still have a charge, they will heal you back to life! There's usually just one charge in a medkit, so I need to be careful again.


After retreating to heal up, I come back for round two. Invisibility should help reduce the damage I take. Even if I weren't randomly falling asleep, a mantis is no joke; I have no resistance whatsoever to its attacks.


Hold it together, Red...


Phew! I'm actually starting to get a good feeling about this run, and I'd hate to spoil it with a stupid death.


Handy stuff. It repairs all damage to your armor, and has a slight chance of even improving it!


Shouldn't the Phantom be purple?







Here we are at our destination. And who is this waiting for us?


It's the King! We'd better go up and say hi!


Is... is that right?


Elvis, no! How could you?

Elvis can be a tough fight. As you see, he does a lot of damage! On the other hand, he doesn't have all that much health, and he soon runs away.



Wait, what's this now?


Oh... kay?


I guess it wasn't Elvis after all! The gimmick of this level is that it's swarming with Elvis Impersonators, plus one real Elvis.
What you're supposed to do is carefully watch the songs the Elvises sing when they wake up to tell if they're real or not. If you fight the real Elvis, he just teleports away when defeated. The idea is to run away and leave the real Elvis alone. He'll fall back asleep, and you can deal with the imposters and come back.


Oh right, still sleepy. It would be better for me to actually get some rest before fighting bosses, yah? This is a pretty good place to do it, the spawn rate seems to be very low on this level.


Of course, there are some monsters already active on the level. Sigh.



JUST LET ME SLEEP. I should have used ArmorAll on my shield before this happened. It's not that big a deal, though, shields are easily replaced.


Now, don't think that all it takes to get a good night's sleep is for monsters to stop chewing on your face and shield. Trying to sleep on the cold hard castle floor only gets you so far.


6 in the morning. Still too early, still sleepy.


Shit. Well, at least that Elvis is asleep, I can hoover my shit back up without him bothering me.



Nope, still not enough sleep.



One more fake down.



Just because you're so tired you're falling asleep in the middle of fights doesn't mean you should be allowed to actually go to sleep, duh.





Oh ho, there are two of them?



This seems like a reasonable application of force!





Ok, so maybe it's not a one-hit-kill weapon. But you know what puts a missile launcher ahead of the competition?




MORE MISSILES.


You know what, there's a bunch of these guys. Let's fast forward a bit.


More missiles make this task quite reasonable.


Just a neat little touch on the boomerangs. Even the generic non-tech weapons can have the occasional special ability!




... I could have used this a long time ago. Well, better late than never! Coffee can really help smooth out the sleepiness problem. It also gives a tiny boost to consitution. Nice, but not really something to depend on.


You can see a couple rooms that look completely closed off, but castles and ruins will never have unused space. Normally you have to search for secret doors, Heightened Vision means I'll spot them soon just by walking around.


Wait... isn't that the line?


It was! And that means it was the real Elvis! And I just happened to have killed all the impersonators first on accident, so I can't show you what happens when you fight Elvis too early.

You'll just have to play it yourself to find out!


This is what we came to get. This is one of the items needed to beat the game! And, coincidentally, is the only one of the plot items that I've ever managed to get in the past.


This appeared mysteriously to guide us to our next destination. Let's have a listen!


Uh.. hunh. Well, that's a thing. A thing that I am going to tackle in the future, because for now...


I'm taking a break. See you next time!