Platform-exclusives tend to happen for one of three reasons:

1) The platform owner has funded the development of the game, or paid the publisher a large amount of money for exclusivity.

2) The developer/publisher only expects development for one platform to be profitable and considers that investment in porting would be wasted expenditure.

3) There are particular hardware features of one platform, such as mouse/keyboard on the PC, or the Wiimote on the Wii/Wii-U, which the game has been specifically designed to use and which can't be replicated on another platform.

All three of these reasons are becoming less common over time.

In the case of 1), it's not that the platform owners wouldn't like to fund more exclusives, but that it's become more expensive to do so. Development costs for an AAA game are now are many, many times what they were back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation. First-party games often function as loss-leaders (or at least, mediocre investments) anyway - they get the console's installed base up to attract the third parties, whose licensing fees are where the profit really lies for the console manufacturer.

Back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, reason 2) used to be very common. The installed base of the PS2 was completely out of proportion with that of its competition. With all three consoles having quite different architecture, cross-platform development was a pain. For a lot of mid-ranking developers, releasing only for the PS2 would make a lot of sense; even with a multiplatform release, 90% of their sales would come from that platform.

No console since then has matched the PS2's dominance. The Wii got an early lead last time in installed base terms, but its attach rate ended up miserable, particularly for third party games. The 360 and the PS3 tended to level-peg on installed base and attach rare, albeit with some regional variations.

And reason 3)? There are still a handful of PC exclusives - complex strategy games and simulators - which wouldn't work without a mouse and keyboard. But those aren't all that common these days. As for developing around motion-controllers on the consoles - too many developers got burned on the Wii and Kinect for anybody to have any enthusiasm for that any more.

I once ended up in the same room as a pair of people who had been sending me death threats over the net. It was amazing.

This is back in 2002, when I was the head admin of a major UK-based Counter-Strike league (Barrysworld, for those with long memories of the UK online gaming scene). This is a good way to make enemies - you can never manage something like that without upsetting people and the Counter-Strike community (back then at least) had more than its fair share of immature pricks.

Anyway, there's one particular clan in the league which, towards the end of my first season in charge, is picking up a real reputation for hurling quite nasty abuse at their opponents before, during and after games. After one of my admins passes me screenshots showing some really nasty stuff in-game (vitriolic racist abuse) during their latest match, I throw them out of the league.

This does not sit well with them, particularly as they were in with a shot of winning their divison at the time. There's the inevitable IRC explosion, resulting in a series of quick channel-bans. Then the private messages and e-mails start up. Two of their members do not want to let this drop and, for the next month or so, I get a string of abuse from them. It starts with insults, but when those don't get a response from me, ramps up to threats. They're going to do unspeakable things to me, to my parents, my grandparents, my dog (I don't have a dog, but hey) and so on. And... I ignore it. Actually, no, I have a good laugh at some of it (it's very much in the camp of "a 16 year old's idea of what scary sounds like).

And then I go with my own clan to a big LAN party - one with a whole UK-profile, in a major venue, split over three days. And I meet up there with some of the other people involved in the league. And one of them mentions to me that my two little stalkers are both present at the event.

So I go over. And I introduce myself. And I am lovely and polite. I smile lots. And I remind them, in a "ha ha, isn't this all funny" manner of some of the things they've been saying to me.

I am not physically imposing in any way. Tall, yes. But kinda scrawny as well. I don't think I'd have a clue how to even go about making myself look intimidating. But I've never seen two people look so scared in my life. I think it was just the acute social discomfort I was causing rather than any kind of menace.

It was utterly hilarious. Never heard a squeak from either of them ever again.

Whereas in reality, the differences between the PS4 and Xbox-One (and their respective software lineups) are vanishingly small. The PS4 generally offers a marginal performance benefit. The Xbox-One has marginally better multimedia functionality (though still not as good as the old PS3). But you're really down to splitting hairs here and only pedants or perfectionists will ever notice the difference.

And on the games/franchises front? Exclusives are fewer and further between than ever and the PS/Xbox franchises largely parallel each other. Gran Turismo vs Forza. Killzone vs Gears of War. To be honest, I don't think any of the current gen consoles has a "must have" exclusive yet. Bloodborne (released later this month) might manage to become the first - but the nature of the industry these days is that cross-platform games get most of the effort and attention.

There's really very little to choose between the two machines. Rational decision making factors right now might include price, which platform your friends game on and possibly the future promise of a particular must-have exclusive. Everything else comes down to marketing messages.

There was some Nielsen market-research data published recently on why current-generation console owners had published the console they had. For PS4 owners, the answer was "better resolution", for Xbox One owners it was "brand" and for the Wii-U it was "fun-factor". There's been a lot written about this data since it was published.

But what I suspect is that it tells us very little about either the consoles themselves. Rather, it tells us a lot about the self-image of the people who buy them. So the PS4 fans are the ones who want to be able to point at the bigger numbers. The Xbox-One fans are the ones who honestly do care about brand (and given this is US survey data, "buy American" is probably a big part of it). And Wii-U fans have a strange obsession that they have some kind of monopoly on fun. Watch the fanboy-wars on any gaming forum of your choice (and they are more vicious this generation than I've ever seen them before) and you will find that each of those stereotypes holds up remarkably well.

And does resolution actually matter hugely? I'm unconvinced. If I want technical perfection (and sometimes I do), I'm playing on a PC anyway. Some of my favourite console games of the last generation were a technical mess.

I would argue that framerate matters more for certain genres. For anything requiring fast reactions and/or fine control, such as a shooter, high-end driving game or fighting game, a steady 60fps translates into a huge increase in responsiveness.

I think it's generally accepted now that in performance terms, the new console hardware has disappointed; promises of 1080p x 60fps haven't materialised. Given the constraints of a fixed hardware platform, I'd rather developers drop resolution or image quality in return for a higher/steadier framerate.

It's likely not an issue of finding the bits of metal. As you say, the water isn't particularly deep. It's more a question of identification.

A lot of ships were sunk at Leyte Gulf, as well as general merchantman losses in the area during WW2. Remember that when these ships sink, they don't tend to go down in one neat piece. In particular, with warships like Musashi, it's quite common for one or more of the magazines to blow before the ship sinks. That creates a huge explosion and tends to break the wreck into a lot of small pieces.

Conclusively identifying which piece belongs to which ship has probably required the bulk of the effort here.

Ah... the Yamato-class. Largest battleships ever built, but largely obsolete before they ever went out to sea.

For those unfamiliar with the history of the class, the Yamato-class vessels were Japan's final generation of large battleships, which entered service from 1941 onwards. Their 18-inch guns were the largest to be mounted on any battleship during WW2. Four ships were commissioned, but only two - Yamato and Musashi - were completed as battleships. A third, the Shinano, was converted into a carrier, while the fourth was cancelled.

The two ships that were completed as battleships (Yamato in particular) were of immense symbolic value in Japan during WW2. In addition to this, they consumed vast quantities of fuel and required specialised ammunition that was rarely available in sufficient quantities. For the above reasons, both Yamato and Musashi were held back from the major Pacific Theatre battles until late 1944 (by which time it was probably too late for them to have any impact anyway).

They were, in essence, the best WW1 warships ever made... except that they were deployed during WW2. The age of the dreadnought-style battleship was on its way out by this point and the era of aircraft carrier dominance had begun. Even if Musashi and Yamato had been deployed for key battles such as Midway and Guadalcanal, it's unlilkely they would have made much difference.

But they are, nevertheless, spectacular ships. In visual terms, they epitomize the classic battleship profile - long, low and dangerous, with very large guns. Their symbolic value has lasted long beyond the war; the Yamato remains something of a national symbol (albeit a controversial one, with links to the far-right) in Japan and has lived on in popular culture through the sci-fi franchise Space Battleship Yamato (adapted as Starblazers in the US).

And as for the specifics of this story; there's not much detail given, but I suspect that the challenge was not so much finding the wreck as conclusively identifying it. There are no shortage of Japanese WW2 wrecks in that part of the Pacific; the problem is sorting out which is which in the face of scant records.

It's also been hilarious to watch their long-term relationship with the video games industry. They worked out ages ago that there's money to be made from video games and that they'd like some of it. But how they've gone about it defies belief.

Because the problem is that if the video games are too good, they might make people feel that they don't need the miniatures. So their history with the video-gaming industry is mostly one of third-party titles that were deliberately specced to be mediocre, a horribly misguided cockteasing of Blizzard (whose long term commercial consequences for Games Workshop almost stand up there with those for Nintendo after they played too hard with Sony over the SNES-CD) and... the Relic games (the Dawn of War series, plus Space Marine), which were actually dangerously good.

Since Relic folded, it's clear that GW aren't going to let anybody else that talented near the cash-cow WH40k franchise - all that's produced these days are mobile-style deliberately-inferior ports of GW's oldest board-games.

Sorry, input lag is a huge issue for me, even on a controller. I've returned two games to the store for refunds because of it: Shift 2 on the 360 and The Last of Us on the PS3 (though the PS4 version is much more playable).

If you aren't finding input lag a problem, then you are either playing games where it matters less (RPGs etc) or else you aren't playing at the kind of level where fine control matters. For me, playing a game with heavy input lag (which includes almost any PC game with vsync enabled) feels like playing while wearing oven mitts.

The funny thing is that there are other cases in which buying a key for cheaper than you can get it on the official Ubisoft store is absolutely fine.

For example, just before Christmas, Far Cry 4 was £45 in the UK via the uPlay store. Alternatively, you could walk into Game (the UK's largest high street games retailer) and pick up a boxed copy of the game for £30. If you do that, you still need to register the code in the box with uPlay and run the game via uPlay, though you do get the option of doing the initial install from a physical disc (useful if you have a slow net connection). But that appears to have been absolutely fine.

Second case, the launch of Assassin's Creed: Unity was delayed on Steam in many parts of the world (so for a while, the only way to buy a digital-only copy was uPlay). But it did launch just before Christmas. During the Steam Christmas Sale, there were days when the game was £45 on uPlay and half that amount on Steam. Again, this is absolutely fine with Ubisoft.

So if what people on forums are saying is true (and we do always have to be a bit cautious here), then it would appear that the old adage that "if it looks too good to be true, it probably is" doesn't necessarily hold true. After all, if the same kinds of discounts are available from multiple retailers, some of which are mystically "Ubisoft approved" and others aren't (though no list of the former is published), then the end-consumer might justifiably confused as to which is which.

says the guy who bought a 980 just before Christmas. Yeah... hypocrisy much.

However, be aware that minimum specs for games are in a bit of a state of flux at the moment. In some senses, it's not before time; they've only risen very slowly for many years, as development of most games was targeted first and foremost at the Xbox 360 and PS3, with PC versions usually not receiving much more than a few cosmetic upgrades. For quite a few years now, a reasonably recent i3/middle-aged i5 (or AMD equivalent) and a sensible Nvidia 400-series (or AMD equivalent) would have done you fine.

Since the summer of 2014, we've seen a rise in the number of games developed primarily for the PS4 and Xbox One and then scaled up for PC, or indeed, developed for PC and then scaled down for the consoles (Alien: Isolation a fairly clear example of the latter). And as this has happened, there's been a trend for rapidly rising specs.

Shadow of Mordor, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age: Inquisition have all needed substantially higher specs to run sensibly than was the norm a year ago. CPU, GPU, RAM and, frankly, even hard drive speed have all been pushed quite hard by the games above - you're now talking about wanting at least a recent i5 and a 780 if you like 1080p max settings. It might be that things will level out again soon. Or it might be that the increase will rise for a bit further yet. It will level out, when developers find a sweet spot that makes it easy to cross-develop between current-gen consoles and PC. But it might be worth waiting for performance analysis of how The Witcher 3's final build works before committing to a hardware upgrade - that's looking like the most technically demanding game on the horizon.

That was certainly true for the Wii and Wii-U, but I'm not sure it holds up for Nintendo's other consoles. The Gamecube hardware was, by all accounts, good. Better than the PS2's and not far short of the Xbox's. It's still slightly amazing that the PS2 did as well as it did, given it was both underpowered and a complete dog to develop for.

The N64 was more complicated; most of its hardware was pretty decent, but the decision to stick with cartridges rather than move to a CD format for games doomed it in the race with the Playstation. That was probably the most significant point in console-history (I'd rank it above even the Atari-crash, which was strictly a US phenomenon) - the moment Nintendo decided, on the basis of piracy fears, to part way with almost all of its significant third party developers (and also to massively annoy Sony, who had done a load of development work in partnership with Nintendo on CD-based console technology). If the N64 had used CDs, chances are the industry would look completely different today.

In the early days of the 360, MS spent a lot of time and money love-bombing Japanese developers to get them to make games primarily for the Japanese market (though many of them got exported to the West). Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey - the two best Japanese RPGs of the first few years of the last generation - were funded by MS, developed in Japan with Japanese as the primary language and English translations provided later. So language was no issue for those. Similarly, MS pumped a lot of money into Cave, making sure that the 360 got ports of a lot of their most notable arcade machines.

All of which did next to nothing. I'm tempted to say MS did absolutely everything it reasonably could to break into Japan. It still didn't work. I wasn't surprised therefore that they've barely even bothered to try this time around with the Xbox One. The Japanese home console market is in a bad way anyway, so it probably doesn't matter anything like as much as it did a decade ago.

They were talking about Kinect - not the Xbox. And "fastest selling entertainment device" is a flexible term - as you can define whatever period you want to base your judgement on.

Going off this it seems to have managed 8 million sales in 2 months. That's certainly got to be a contender for "fastest selling over 2 months". The PS2, Wii and PS4 all might have been able to manage faster, as might some of Apple's portable devices, if they hadn't been constrained by supply shortages.

Of course, Kinect sales flatlined after the first few months, nobody's disputing that. But there is certainly a defined period over which it seems to be "fastest selling".