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On this week’s episode of The TouchArcade show, we power through conversations about beard slaps, our childhood dreams, special effects, and Terminator 2 in order to bring you the latest, hottest, and best in iOS. At the top, we dig into games like Run Roo Run and Star Marine. Later, we get heavy and dive into the iCade mobile, CAVE’s poor earnings announcement, and Imagination’s latest tech.

I really think this week’s episode was one of our best, so you should listen to it. Hit us up via the handy-dandy streaming links below or, hey, subscribe blindly to our iTunes and Zune feed. You’ll get our episodes the second that they’re live; ADVANTAGE!

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-034.mp3, 44MB

And here are your show notes:

GAMES

• Run Roo Run [$.99 / HD]
• ZDAY Survival Simulator [$1.99]
• Star Marine: Infinity Ammo [$1.99]
• Woody Woodpecker [$.99]
• Mole Kart [$2.99]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• Moneyed Kitty [$.99]

FRONT PAGE

• Gameloft’s New Zealand Offices Cleared Of Over-Working Allegations
• CAVE To Focus On Social Games After Poor Earnings
• Imagination Talks PowerVR Series6 GPU Family
• ION Announces new iPhone, iPad iCade Accessories

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Absolutely nothing about the first five minutes of Darkness Rush: Saving Princess [$0.99] gave me any reason to think it would be a good game. There’s that mouthful of a title, for one thing. An absolutely incomprehensible story and translation didn’t help, and the Castlevania stylings and scantly clad ladies plastered everywhere just made me nervous. Even the tutorial was off-putting – I mean, seriously, how does it take that long to show us how to use a jump button?

It was a huge surprise when I realized two things: this game is an endless runner, and it’s really, really fun.

There are two caveats to lay out before we go any further. This game is poorly optimized even compared with standard Unreal Engine memory consumption. My freshly restarted 4S experiences unforgivably bad frame rate drops sometimes. Only the newest generations can run the game, and crashes are a big problem if you’re low on memory. Also, the game pushes its in-app purchases pretty hard for a paid title, but there’s only one thing that can’t be earned by playing. Prepare to put down an extra dollar if you want to unlock the under-dressed (but fantastic) Helena as a playable character.

Now to the fun. Darkness Rush follows a pretty typical formula for an endless runner. You run and jump as long as you can while collecting coins. Eventually gravity gets the better of you, and you die. Your score is uploaded to the Game Center leaderboards and then you do it all over again.

Yawn, right? But remember the awesome mission set up from Jetpack Joyride [Free]? You’ve got that to contend with here as well. Each time you play you work toward four different missions that change up whenever you earn one. Completing missions gives you experience, and leveling up earns you a new title to show off in multiplayer.

You can spend the coins you earn on equipment and power ups. Each time you start a new game you’re prompted to buy single-use powerups that give you extra lives or double your income, that sort of thing. They’re totally reasonably priced and can make the game much easier. Equipment is less reasonably priced, and could take hours to grind (or moments to buy with real cash). Here’s the thing, though: equipment isn’t just cosmetic – it can also increase your agility, mana, jump height and speed. Makes it a bit more worth the grind than Barry’s flowery lei, no?

Mana is where the real fun is, taking Darkness Rush from your standard running and jumping affair to something a lot more interesting. As with Stylish Sprint [$0.99], you can attack some of the obstacles in your way, and you can fly. Both those things cost mana, which regenerates very, very slowly. Run dry and you’re pretty much toast. But you also collect gems as you run, and once you have three you can transform into a wolf, bat or angel depending on your character. While you’re transformed you don’t use up mana. You can also take an extra hit, which knocks you back to your human form. Managing transformations adds a whole new level to the game, and it’s the key to getting a good score.

Then there’s multiplayer. It’s not currently a huge selling point, to be frank. Once you make it through the wait for a match (which varies wildly with the game’s relatively small user base) you’re dropped into a foot race against another player. If you die you get set back, so it’s mostly a challenge to see who can die less. Considering the lag and frame rate drops, this gets pretty hilariously bad.

But multiplayer is just icing on an otherwise excellent cake. The terrible translation is due to be fixed, and it sounds like there may be some optimizations coming down the line, too. I sure hope so. As endless runners go, this one is gorgeous, varied and tons of fun, so it deserves to be playable. And if you’re sitting there steaming that all the lovely gothic art has gone to waste as an endless runner, swing by our discussion thread. Rumor has it that LuckySheep will be moving on to something more Castlevania-like next. I can’t wait, but dear lord – let them hire an editor first.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Semi Secret Software, the studio behind Canabalt, has announced that its working on a brand new iPad game alongside Greg Wohlwend of Solipskier [$.99] fame. According to a tweet from Semi Secret, this’ll be its first new game in over a year.

Get ready for a crusher: we don’t know much about this collaboration. The aforementioned tweet links to PlayHundreds.com, an undoubtedly artful web site that’s teasing something relevant, but not immediately apparent. We realize this isn’t a whole lot to go on. Semi Secret is pretty good at this game development thing, though, so we’re OK with assuming that this is worth keeping an eye out for.

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This is cool, guys. Below, you’ll get your first look at Beat Sneak Bandit’s silhouette mode. There are four of these babies in every chapter, but you can only access them by collecting the “bonus” small clocks scattered about in every level. Developer Simogo is telling us that you’ll unlock one for every ten clocks, and that these levels are locked away because they bolster the real challenge of the rhythm meets stealth title.

We aren’t the only dudes digging Beat Sneak, by the way. It’s up for Best Mobile Game in the IGF awards, and has received honorable mentions in Excellence in Visual Art, as well as Excellence in Audio. Not too shabby, eh? Then again, this is the studio behind Bumpy Road [$2.99]. So awesome.

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