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The bonus is back, dudes! On this week’s special edition of the TouchArcade Show, Eli and I sit back in our e-chairs with Team Eufloria’s Rudolf Kremers in order to discuss Eufloria and the imminent iPad port. We also explore Kremers’ work history, his creative motivation, and the future of Eufloria, Team Eufloria, and Omni Labs. We learned a lot, and we’re guessing you will, too.

If you’d like to give this episode a listen, doing so is easy: just hit up one of the handy links below or, hey, subscribe to our podcast feed on iTunes or Zune. The latter is the easiest way to get our episodes the second they’re released.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-Bonus-030.mp3, 19MB

Our extensive hands-on preview of Eufloria is coming this Wednesday, by the way, and all that noise I made in our discussion seems to be pretty warranted. Also, after Kremers gave me a big pat on the back for pronouncing his name right, I ended up messing it up a total of three times throughout the show. My bad, my man!

Look out for another TouchArcade Show this coming Friday and another awesome bonus show next week. You won’t want to miss either of these.

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Let’s wind the clocks back to Tuesday when news hit that Zynga was relentlessly ripping off NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower [Free] with their Canadian pre-release “beta” of Dream Heights [Free]. Dream Heights is basically identical to Tiny Tower in every way, except for the lack of the Bitbook and a different art style. News of this spread like wildfire, and it wasn’t long before even the mainstream media was reporting on it. (These are crazy times we live in, I tell you.) Well, Zynga has been silent on the matter as far as we can tell, which you’d think would result in a dead story.

Not so fast though, as Glu also seem to be anxious to hop on the relentlessly ripping off Tiny Tower bandwagon with a similar Canadian release of Small Street [Free]. Small Street is arguably an even bigger knockoff than Dream Heights with the only changes being the tower laid vertically into a street and the elevator car replaced with a taxi.

Fans of Tiny Tower will find these screenshots curiously similar:

I guess when it rains it pours in regards to cloning NimbleBit games. The only question left, is which company is going to release their own Tiny Tower knockoff next?

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Scribblenauts [$.99] developer 5th Cell isn’t one-and-done with iPhone and iPad. This Thursday, actually, will see the release of its second game, a “micro-platformer” called Run Roo Run. It looks remarkably 5th Cell, and according to exclusive details given to Joystiq, it certainly sounds like a game we’ll definitely be getting into.

In a nutshell, Run Roo Run is an extremely cutesy and heavily instance-based runner — think, Canabalt [$.99] but with levels and a kangaroo. The experience is sliced and diced into a series of 420 individual levels that are, also, divided cleanly into chapters that all introduce new obstacles or other new elements, like, items. Each week 5th Cell plans to push 10 more additional levels to the game without the need to update.

One really interesting thing that popped up during the Joystiq interview about Run Roo Run was the subject of its inspiration. The initial idea came from Space is Key, an insanely awesome flash game that you’ve got to play right now.

[Via Joystiq]

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Scribblenauts [$.99] developer 5th Cell isn’t one-and-done with iPhone and iPad. This Thursday, actually, will see the release of its second game, a “micro-platformer” called Roo Roo Run. It looks remarkably 5th Cell, and according to exclusive details given to Joystiq, it certainly sounds like a game we’ll definitely be getting into.

In a nutshell, Roo Roo Run is an extremely cutesy and heavily instance-based runner — think, Canabalt [$.99] but with levels and a kangaroo. The experience is sliced and diced into a series of 420 individual levels that are, also, divided cleanly into chapters that all introduce new obstacles or other new elements, like, items. Each week 5th Cell plans to push 10 more additional levels to the game without the need to update.

One really interesting thing that popped up during the Joystiq interview about Roo Roo Run was the subject of its inspiration. The initial idea came from Space is Key, an insanely awesome flash game that you’ve got to play right now.

[Via Joystiq]

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It isn’t a surprise to us that 60beat’s new GamePad controller made some major waves last week. It’s a proper, corded controller with a full range of button and joysticks. Also, it requires zero technical savvy. Just plug it in and go.

This all sounds great… but since we still don’t have a GamePad in our hands, we decided to quiz Pangea Software’s Brian Greenstone about it. Pangea is behind Bugdom 2 [$2.99], which is one of the two games currently supporting the controller.

I asked him three questions. The first was what it was like to develop for the device, and if it was easy or hard. Greenstone’s answer leaves us hopeful that other studios will pick up support, provided the GamePad sells well enough.

“It was very easy. All I had to do was add their SDK to my project, change my Audio Session type, and then make some basic calls to start the data flowing. Bugdom 2 already used a virtual gamepad in the game itself, so the code to work with that kind of control scheme was already in place which made things very easy.

I had it all up and running in less than an hour.”

There are no developer  or game limitations, by the way — all the buttons and directional control work, straight-up. It sounds like voice-chat support is out, though, when the device is plugged in.

“No developer limitations other than the forced use of a particular Audio Session mode, but I don’t think that would affect most games, unless there are games that require the microphone to be working. So, probably no voice-chat games.

The user limitation is just that having the gamepad plugged in causes the audio on the iPhone / iPad to go thru the audio jack. That means that you have to use the supplied splitter and listen to the game with headphones.”

Greenstone said Pangea will continue to support the device if its successful and Bugdom 2 sees a sharp spike in sales. That sounds pretty reasonable.

We’re looking forward to telling you all about this thing first-hand in the coming days. Come on, Mr. Postman!

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You guys, I had the Worst Christmas Ever this year. No, it’s not because I didn’t get an iPad 2 – I mean, it’s pretty much a job requirement for me to be set in that department – so my (ex-) friends and (former) loved ones are off the hook for that. No, what I can’t get over is the fact that Santa did not leave me a puppy this year. Seriously, I blew up Twitter for weeks with links to dog videos and pet adoption websites and no one picked up on the hints? Collective friends and family, you are dead to me.

Luckily, RagTag Studio’s Puppy Panic [$.99] is here to numb my pain. A cute, well-made endless runner, Puppy Panic helped take my mind off of the callousness of those most dear to me by presenting me with a stable of eight (nine, if you count the secret one) puppies for me to race and play with. Each puppy has special abilities unique to their breed that help it in various ways throughout the game’s two modes. When you start with the Beagle, for example, you can double-jump really high, and when you get the Eskimo, you can bark and clear all the obstacles from your path.

The games themselves are pretty much the same, with slight variations. In Squirrel Chase, your puppy chases a squirrel and must dodge bouncy red balls, jump over tree stumps and duck under low-flying birds in order to catch up with it. In Cloud Surfing, your puppy has to bounce along on clouds to catch up to an airplane while avoiding falling through the clouds or running into birds. (Dog LSD may or may not be involved.) Beating both game types with a puppy breed unlocks endless mode for that puppy, meaning you can continuously chase squirrels or airplanes (which I’m pretty sure my existing dog dreams about on a daily basis).

But I know why you’re really here. You don’t care about catching squirrels or airplanes. You’re here for the puppies, am I right? You want to know how to get your hands on a sweet little puppy of your very own. I feel you. So pay attention, because you’re about to get the lowdown on how to get your hands on a bunch of puppies, and I’m only saying this once.

OK, here it is. In case your parents never told you where puppies came from, Puppy Panic blows the lid right off that secret—they come from vending machines, duh! But, like, really big vending machines that only take puppy coins, which you earn through successfully passing trials with your first puppy. You get your first puppy handed to you by the game, presumably because the prior owner of the puppy coin was already losing his or her mind due to the alarmingly large number of puppies the game gives you, and the thought of getting one more out of the vending machine would have driven them to adorable, floppy-eared suicide.

Despite the overall adorableness of the game, there are improvements I would definitely like to see made. While the two game types are solid and well-designed, I would love to see more made available in future updates. The same two games, over and over, for all eight puppy types is repetitive, and while playing and beating both game types with each puppy unlocks endless running mode for that particular puppy breed, I couldn’t be bothered with it after a while because it all felt the same.

The special abilities each puppy has, too, are a bit unbalanced. For example, the Corgi’s ability to automatically avoid pretty much all birds (because it has short legs!) made the game too easy for me, whereas the Dalmatian’s ability to call a firetruck to its aid never got used.

Even with these small downsides, Puppy Panic is a fun take on the runner genre. For about a buck, you get pretty much endless entertainment, especially since you can pick your favorite puppy out of eight to customize the playing experience. If you’re a fan of runners in general, this is a really cute, family-friendly option. And you don’t even have to worry about your furniture getting chewed up.

TouchArcade Rating:

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