"Rayman Legends Challenges App" is a mouthful. It's not an aerodynamic moniker - let's just be up-front about that. But as a consolation prize for Rayman's delayed release, it's entirely possible that you may find yourself consoled.

The challenges change from time to time, and focus on different types of play or amounts of players, but the ones for Murfy's Dungeon let people get into the guts of the asymmetry that made the original demo so compelling. You really have to take a second to appreciate what they did here, creating a conduit for new players versed in today's tap and touch dialectic to play with - not alongside, with - what we think of as a traditional player playing in a traditional way. It would be like if you could create the "missing link" after the fact. Performing an incredible trick where you raise a curtain and reveal that, whoa, everybody is playing games and a lot of discussion about what type of game or what type of gamer comes down to the fact that there just isn't much connective tissue between the great kingdoms of play.

In order to play a game with someone, more often than not, you usually have to be playing the same game. That probably seems like something you wouldn't have to enunciate, but not everybody likes to do the same stuff, let alone has spent their lives building the skillset required to perform pixel-accurate jumps. The Challenge App, in part, features an "endless run" game where one player is the runner and other player is the level. Like I said, you gotta take a second.

I received an invitation to Microsoft's new Xbox Thing on the 21st of May, so now I can't stop thinking about the dumb thing even though I'd decided to put it to bed until we had actual information. I've been thinking about how many of the features announced at the Playstation 4 event wouldn't exist without a connection; no streaming, no social feeds, no sharing, virtually the entire thrust of the presentation would evaporate. But nobody is trying to sell the benefits of Always Off, because there aren't any; people aren't about buying a console to bury in the backyard. They want a modern device, they just want to own it as much as possible, in an era where the Limited License is rapidly becoming the ground floor. The "Always On" story is shifting, though, from what was said to be a system-level policy into a kind of "product" they offer publishers on a title by title basis. Is that... better?

(CW)TB out.