Of all the game-related news this week, I randomly selected and illustrated five of them for your reading and viewing pleasure. Weekends are fun again!

The Wii U’s unique tablet-like controller has sparked interest from many developers like id Software and Gearbox. Earlier this week, Valve Co-Founder Gabe Newell told Joystiq that the Wii U seems a lot more powerful than current consoles and is more scalable in terms of CPU performance and graphics. This doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing Half-Life 3 on the Wii U, but we can dream!

Atlus's Creative Designer, Jeremy Cail, talked to the[a]listdaily about the hardships of marketing Catherine, the provocative puzzle-platformer. It seems retailers were not too happy with the naughty cover art, so Atlus toned down the sluttiness while leaving the actual game content intact. Catherine has been getting pretty good review scores in Japan, so this chick might be worth picking up when she hits the U.S. next month.

We’ve seen in-game advertisements before, but if you have an Xbox 360 with Kinect you’ll now be able to interact with them. With NUads you can use the peripheral’s voice-recognition system to talk to your console, saying things like "Xbox Tweet" to post information about how much you enjoy Coke on your Twitter profile or "Xbox schedule" to be reminded of TV shows you’d like to watch. Advertisers are super excited -- gamers, not so much.... "Xbox initiate euthanasia protocol B15."

Technology blog TechCrunch reported that three game companies are interested in buying casual-games giant PopCap, one of them being Electronic Arts. How much do Bejeweled gems cost in real life? Over one billion dollars! This has not been set in stone yet, but it’s totally possible since EA already bought Playfish (Facebook game publisher) and Chillingo (Angry Birds publisher).

The third map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops will be available on Xbox Live next Tuesday, June 28, but that’s not the only Call of Duty release next week. Software retailer GameStop has listed a “Call of Duty: Black Ops Limited Edition with DLC,” which is also due out next Tuesday. It’s not clear which DLC comes with the bundle, but for $60 it’d be nice to have all of them.