In Catch the Candy [99� / HD], the new game from BulkyPix and FedoIT, you play a fuzzy little fellow trying reach your one true love: a shiny piece of candy. While a bit reminiscent of Cut the Rope's Om Nom in looks and desires, our anonymous protagonist doesn't have nearly as many resources helping him out. You won't find yourself manipulating strings or bubbles or anything like that � this little guy can only use his tongue.

This limitation leads to some great one-touch gameplay. Your tongue is more like a grappling hook. Tap on something, and your tongue will fly out to it and stick to it or nudge it (depending on the surface type). Early on, it's easy to use these talents to reach the candy. Tap the ground and you'll drag yourself along. Tap an overhead beam and you'll swing into the air. Tap the candy once you can reach it, and it'll come straight to you.

Sounds easy enough, but Catch the Candy doesn't take long to get complicated. You'll need to move objects around, climb sheer cliffs, swim underwater and do all sorts of crazy stunts to get to your precious candy. This can lead to some frustrating situations where you just can't get your tongue to latch onto the right thing, but there's a quick level restart and even a level skip if you get stuck.

That leads me to Catch the Candy's big flaw. Your goal is to get to the candy in the fewest taps possible, but nothing really pushes you to conserve your taps. There are Open Feint/Game Center achievements for finishing the game with the fewest total taps possible (and opposing achievements for using huge amounts of them). But you can ignore those and tap hundreds of times each level if you're having a rough time. This is a game that desperately needs a star system to rate your performance.

It's a shame, too, because otherwise Catch the Candy is a lot of fun. There are frustrating levels � you try climbing over a sheer wall using only your tongue � but most of the current levels are great. Some are even delightful. I'd rather not give any surprises away, but in later levels you'll find yourself playing whole other games� with your tongue. Even the more mundane levels often have entertaining backdrops. I never expected to climb Mount Doom tongue-first, but there you have it.

If the achievements are enough to motivate you to keep your taps low, Catch the Candy has plenty of replayability. There are 53 levels currently, and BulkyPix has also said more are on the way. I definitely haven't had enough of some of the mechanics we get to see in later levels, so I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

If you didn't quite get your fill of wandering around in an empty game world powered by the Unreal Engine in Epic Citadel [Free], you're in luck. Codenrama just released Castlerama [Free], a remarkably similar tech demo that allows you to walk around and similarly look at just what the Unreal Engine is capable of on iOS devices.

Per the YouTube description of the above video, it seems like the developers are running into similar issues as the Dream:Scape developer last month with the memory limitations of older devices:

While developing Castlerama, we had to face the fact that newer devices such as iPhone4s and iPad2s are very different from their predecessors, iPhone3GSs and iPads, in that the former have twice as much memory. In order to have the app run on all devices, we had to compromise quite a bit, pushing the old devices to their limits (risking crash if other applications are left running) while keeping the new devices well behind their capabilities. In the future we believe we will have to develop two versions for each application.

Castlerama looks awesome, and if what they've released is a "compromise" to work with older devices, I seriously can't wait to see what the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 exclusive build is capable of. If you've got some spare time today and want to see another demonstration of the Unreal Engine, give Castlerama a try.

I'm still waiting for some major Unreal Engine-powered game releases, but I suppose tech demos are a good first start.

Recently I embarked on a quest to see if there was a way I could stream my PC games to my iPad using the various remote desktop apps available on the App Store. Initially, this resulted in countless hours (and dollars) wasted, only to be disappointed time and time again. Some apps had no audio, others were nowhere near responsive enough, and some of them just flat out didn't work� Then came Splashtop Remote Desktop [99� / Lite / HD].

Splashtop is a remote desktop client that streams your PC or Mac screen directly to your iPad, iPod touch, or iPhone with amazingly fast response times, and full streaming audio. Installation and setup couldn't be easier. All you do is install the desktop software and download the app and you're up and running. Keep in mind, using Splashtop outside of your local network will require fiddling with port forwarding, and unless you've got an insane internet connection, will bring the response time down to be almost unplayable. However, on the same network, Splashtop is basically a 1:1 representation of what is happening on your PC, and is totally enjoyable to game on.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest limitation while using Splashtop is the somewhat inevitable control issue as you're playing games meant for a controller, keyboard, and/or mouse using an odd touchscreen setup. There is an onscreen keyboard but it obscures too much of the screen to be usable. The onscreen arrow keys are nice, but most games require more than just 4 buttons to play.

Windowed games work OK, but for Splashtop to really shine, you need to be playing something fullscreen. I've found that using the OnLive service is by far the best way to game with using this setup. OnLive allows fullscreen play and automatically sets the resolution to your iPad or iPhone's screen. Also the menus are very controller friendly, and these days OnLive not only has a great selection of games, but has tons of free trials.

Puzzle games seem to work great, as they're mostly mouse controlled which translates well with how Splashtop interprets your touches as mouse movements and clicks. Anything more complex than that really requires a controller. The developers of Splashtop have attempted to remedy this issue by offering a free Splashtop Remote Touchpad [Free] app which you can run on your iPhone or iPod touch, but we've had much better luck using Joypad [$2.99 / Free] which we've already reviewed and liked quite a bit for playing emulated games.

Using your iPad running Splashtop and your iPhone running Joypad, you can do a surprising amount of PC gaming on your iPad. Sure, the setup couldn't be more convoluted since you're using two iOS devices, a reasonably specced out gaming PC, and two different paid apps to do it, but how else are you ever going to be able to play World of Warcraft on your iPad?

Games designed with simple controls in mind work fantastic with this setup. I was able to finish Braid using my iPad and iPhone with minimal interruption or lag. Sure, it might have been better to play with a real controller, but the novelty factor of being able to run (and play) a ridiculous number of PC games this way is sky high.

Depending on your home network, and how powerful your PC or Mac is, most people should be able to duplicate my setup easily with similar results. Keep in mind there are a lot of factors in play when using a remote desktop client like this. This laundry lists includes the speed of your host computer, the overall wireless climate in your area, how fast you can typically transfer data over your WiFi network, how low your local ping times usually are, and more. As mentioned in the Joypad review, if you live in an area where the WiFi selection list on your computer scrolls for ages, there might not be anything you can do to improve things.

While this review has focused on the gaming potential of Splashtop, the amount of things you can do with it is incredible. You're able to use anything you can on your computer, with great response times and audio. Also, seeing how well OnLive works this way really makes me wonder when they're going to turn the OnLive Viewer [Free] into an OnLive Client.