A friend of mine was recently talking about trying to get her girlfriend into gaming, and that got me to thinking, what games would non-gamers find appealing.  So I made this handy list of The 10 Best Wii Games to Play with Non-Gamers.

It's a shame there aren't a whole lot of games that use the MotionPlus technology Nintendo created to improve the functionality of the Wii remote.  Games that use that one-to-one motion technology are, when done right, vastly superior to games that use the more primitive technology of the original remote.  Only a handful of games every really showed what MotionPlus could do, but those handful did some cool stuff.  To find out more, read my article on The Five Games that Best Use the Wii MotionPlus.

A few rumors and one not very helpful bit of factual information are out about the Wii U.  The factual bit is that Nintendo has confirmed to investors that the Wii U will launch by the end of the year.  Since they'd already announced it would launch in 2012 this doesn't seem like news at all, but everyone's reporting it anyway, so I guess I will too.

In terms of rumors, there are two of interest in a Nintendo Enthusiast rumor roundup.  One is that Nintendo has created something called the Nintendo Network that will handle online capabilities for the Wii U and 3DS, including online capabilities and downloadable content.  Will Wii U and 3DS games be able to communicate through the network?  We will see.  At any rate, it appears Nintendo may try and create something along the lines of Xbox Live and Sony PSN.

The other rumor is that developers have now been sent final Wii U dev kits.  This would mean that the Wii U specs have been finalized and the kinks worked out.  However, no information has come out on what those specs are or on important questions like whether the console will support multiple touch screen controllers.  All we know is that there are game developers who now know these things.

Develop has quotes a source that claims the Wii U will be about twice as powerful as the Xbox 360, which is more than has been reported but, according to the article, less than some developers had been promised.

The 720, which will arrive in 2013 at the earliest, will be, according to  source talking to IGN,  six times as powerful as the 360 and "will yield 20-percent greater performance" than the Wii U, which isn't that huge a difference.  However, that article doesn't say how powerful IGN's source believes the Wii U will be.  I'm awful at math, but if the Wii U is twice as powerful as the 360 and the 720 is six times as powerful then it should be at least twice as powerful as the Wii U (I figure 2 is twice 1, and 6 is six times one, and 2 is a third of six, which would seem to make the 720 three times as powerful as the Wii U, but I don't know if that calculation works with processors).

For comparison, I googled around to try and figure out how much more powerful the Xbox 360 was than the original Xbox.  This is remarkably difficult to pin down.  In a thread on Gamespot, estimates ranged from a ridiculously high 80 times as powerful to an unlikely 2-3 times as powerful, with more realistic estimates saying 10 to 20 times. No one could really agree, because even if you're good at math, calculating the practical effects of various processors running various speeds through various architectures is tricky.

However, if these rumors are all true (which isn't really that likely) then the Wii U will only offer a moderate improvement over the 360 and the 720 will not be as big a leap as the 360 was.  This is especially true because one of the things that gave the 360 such a big graphical boost was the switch to HD.

So yes, the 720 will certainly be more powerful than the Wii U, but the distance between the two consoles won't be nearly as big as that between the underpowered original Wii and the 360.  This is unsurprising; we are reaching a point of diminishing returns in graphical improvements and Nintendo's strategy of focusing on offering new approaches to gameplay may turn out to be far wiser than a strategy of goosing graphics.

In practical terms, these numbers are all fairly meaningless.  Ultimately we won't know how the Wii U and 720 compare until they both exist in the world.