These pictures are the work of artist Jason Martin. If you've played Mass Effect 2, Force Unleashed II, DC Universe Online or taken an interest in the upcoming Batman game, you may recognise his amazing work.

Martin is an artist at Blur Studios, the guys who bring you many of the gaming world's biggest and baddest cinematic sequences. Which means you never play with any of these lush 3D models, you just get to watch them in intros, trailers and cutscenes.

The following pictures are highlights from his portfolio, which also includes work for upcoming Namco Bandai title Knight's Contract, BioWare's Dragon Age and the Goon animated film.

That Grunt is so good if you squint you'll swear you can see him breathing...

[believerdeceiver]

The makers of DC Universe Online advised that some missions are unbeatable without resorting to that classic comic-book convention, the superhero team-up. Bogged down against the Sinestro Corps, I went in search of a big friend who wanted big action.

Kotaku's MMO reviews are a multi-part process. Rather than deliver day one reviews based on beta gameplay, we play the game for four weeks before issuing our final verdict. Once a week we deliver a log detailing when and how we played the game. We believe this gives readers a frame of reference for the final review. Since MMO titles support many different types of play, readers can compare our experiences to theirs to determine what the review means to them.

I am a complete novice at massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Fahey is normally our man on the subject. But as D.C. Universe Online is a rarity - the console-based MMO - many will experience the genre for the first time with it on the PlayStation 3. I will be one of them, and that journey will be a part of Kotaku's review of the game.

What I Played

My self-assigned task list this week included several goals, all of which I missed. Life happened, unfortunately, and sprinting from level 18 to the all-important 30 just wasn't in the cards after losing two evenings to other priorities.

I did knock down at least a level on the other nights I played, which included mopping up the end of Zatanna's continuity against Trigon and Brother Blood; completing the entire Poison Ivy set of missions, a bunch of sundry sidequests and then finally joining the war with the Green Lantern Corps against Sinestro and his agents. I'm glad I bought a cheapie USB keyboard after last week's sessions.

How It Went

I've learned that standing around and asking "Who wants to help with X," is a good way to be ignored in this game. Then again, I ignore most of those shouts, too. Screw this, I'm busy, right?

Most of my game has been played in singleplayer so far, so my karmic deficiency came back to haunt me in a big way once I picked up Green Lantern's missions. The Sinestro Corps are flat tough. The quest was recommended for level 21, and at equivalent rank, these ring-dings will gang up on you if you make the mistake of fighting more than one, or a stray attack hits another who's engaged with an NPC. They just home in, often spamming a hammer attack and draining your health off with a yellow ray. The hard light shield, an iconic power, is absolutely recommended, and worth the re-spec if you don't have it before this set of missions.

After finishing off the exterior mission set, the game took me inside a shattered Metropolis City Hall for a showdown with Sinestro himself. First, I had to deal with a Manhunter who is insurmountably tough as a solo foe, at this level. It couldn't be more obvious that this was meant to be a cooperative mission. The Manhunter (an Alpha Lantern if you're a villain) regenerates health at a ridiculous rate.

I would get in and set him on fire, then use the heat drain to compound the damage, and the Manhunter just poured on the onslaught while I held block and struggled to recharge. I chugged Soder, crushed the one health barrel, and once lasted long enough to use Eternal Flame, and maybe got the Manhunter down to a third health left before he came back like Rocky IV and blew me away. The Lantern Corps is tits-on-a-bull useless to do anything in this fight other than recite their little poem.

What to do? The wait times in the alert queues were ridiculously long. It seems everybody playing at this time had the same idea as I - go grind in the Alerts and PvP arenas and come back to overpower a tough foe. That really wasn't an option here. It'd take forever. So I picked up the keyboard and asked for help,

No reply. I tried another angle. Checking who was near me, I spied a level 20 character, figuring he may either need help in City Hall himself or would like to knock out a bigger mission out-of-sequence. I invited him to join up. His name is Stavros.

Stavros, if you're reading this, you were a godsend. Back in City Hall we entered the atrium with the Manhunter, and I hung up on the breezeway to pick off the Sinestro Corps veterans. Stavros just jumped straight in, whaling away with a giant flaming sword - quite a site for a giant guy in a white business suit. Remembering that's how I got my ass kicked, I dropped down to go to work on the Manhunter.

We finished it off in less than a minute, with Stavros doing most of the damage. You can check it out in this video below. After that, taking care of Sinestro himself was crazy simple.

The Story So Far

I owed you guys a better week than this, but my mulligan taught me the importance of teamwork, especially as one approaches the later levels within the game. Unfortunately, I still don't feel that I've hit an ah-ha moment yet with D.C. Universe Online. I'm still churning through the mission sets, mashing a ton of buttons and incrementally increasing my gear.

It's a lot of fun, still, but in a highly repetitive sense. Unfortunately, this exposes you to a lot of the game's glitches. For example, I got hung up on some world geometry at Metropolis General Hospital battling LexCorp and had no alternative but to teleport out of there.

Again, hitting level 30 is a priority and my singleminded goal this week, as it'll be imperative to writing a full review on this game. Playing at off-peak times to get in on some more of the alerts will also be on the to-do list.

Despite the glitches and the rather templatized mission structures, it's still an engaging experience, largely glued together by seeing what NPC cameos you'll get, and how the bad guy boss will play out. But it's very much an experience where you'll get out of it what you give. And if, like me, all you're doing is battling solo, you'll have a bland experience through your late-teen levels, until you hit a wall at 21.

My weekly round-up of comics — some of them about video games — is back, in a slightly new format. Read on for my recommendations.

Our Week In Comics column will run every Wednesday, the day new comics are released in comics shops across America and, increasingly often, for download on the iPhone and iPad. Let me know what more you want from this column. For now, some tips on what's worth caring about:

Comics You Should Consider Buying

Batman Odyssey #6: Neal Adams drew beautiful Batman comics in the 70s and finally has returned to the character with Odyssey. Adams' involvement ensured Batman Odyssey would look great, but I had no idea that his writing would be so… amazing. In one issue you've got Batman being shot in the cowl, and in the next you get a painstaking explanation why that's no big deal, as Batman keeps beating up bad guys who are possibly trying to steal an electric car (which they'd been spending about four issues doing.) Then Aquaman shows up. The comic has been nuts. The new issue has Batman teaming up with The Joker, and Deadman, naturally.

Legion of Super-Heroes Annual: Because Keith Giffen is drawing it, and you, like me, may have a weakness for his wonderful, kinectic-yet-blocky art.

Transformers Infestation #1: Look, you might be burned if you spend $4 on this comic and it sucks, but you would own a comic that pits the Autobots against… zombies. It also is part of a cross-over that sends zombies after G.I. Joe heroes and people from Star Trek. How zombies pose a threat to any of these well-armed groups is a mystery to me, a mystery that can only be solved in comics. (Read the preview at our sister site, io9)

Comics With Video Game Connections

DC Universe Online Legends #1: This comic is based on the new DC Universe Online game, though I'm not sure if it is intended to tell the same story the game tells, to expand it, spin-off from it or what. Equally odd is that this comic is coming out every other week for 13 weeks and that it's written by Marv Wolfman and Tony Bedard. Wolfman also co-wrote the game — not sure why the game and the comic need co-writers — but the draw for me is Bedard, a fantastic up-and-coming writer whose R.E.B.E.L.s and Green Lantern Corps comics have been full of surprises.

Kane and Lynch #6: I've got no insight on this one. It's the finale of the Kane and Lynch comic. Official description: "The hard-hitting, bullet-riddled conclusion is here! Kane and Lynch have killed their way around the globe, fighting every thug and assassin thrown at them and lived. But how do they survive their greatest obstacle of all – each other?! This showdown of epic proportions leads into the best-selling Kane & Lynch: Dog Days video game!"

Pokemon Arceus and the Jewel of Life (Graphic Novel): "Long ago, Legendary Pokémon Arceus was betrayed by a human it trusted with its life. Now Arceus is back for vengeance. With the help of their new friends Sheena and Kevin, Ash and Dawn must convince Arceus not to destroy humankind."

Sonic The Hedgehog #221: I'll let the professional promotions people explain this one: "Sonic's eager to hear the new sound of Mina and her band, but will he like what he hears? Tensions are running high, and that's before an evil presence starts lurking in the shadows! Then, in 'Second Impressions,' Nicole and Espio deal with the fallout from the Iron Dominion invasion - along with a surprise third party!"

And Over On The iPad…

Comixology's Comics app is daring to sell some old Clone Saga Spider-Man comics for $1.99 a pop. Those are from the much-maligned story that involved a clone named Ben Reilly proving to have been the guy we all thought was Spider-Man for over a decade. Fans hated this, but I am morbidly curious. Tempting! They're also starting to offer $1.99 issues of Alan Moore's wonderful Top 10, a police procedural set in a city where everyone, from the cops, to the criminals, to the citizens has super-powers. The Comics+ app is selling the Dead Space: Salvage graphic novel for $8 (I haven't read it, so I don't know if it's good.)

Finishing off Giganta in D.C. Universe Online this week, I was treated to this scene, and a reminder that no matter how much the medium matures, comic books' emotional attachments are made in your youngest and most vulnerable years.

For those not playing this video game, in D.C. Universe Online you create a super character, then send him or her off to fight against and alongside D.C. Comics' most recognizable characters. Many missions build to a crescendo where you take down a principal adversary. After that success, you get a cinematic as a kind of payoff.

Spoiler alert: If you're playing the game and want to see this for yourself, don't watch the clip below or read any further.

To this point, all the cutscenes I'd watched were told from the perspective of the defeated villain, in a biographical tone that justified their megalomania and reasons for world domination, over a montage of comic book panels.

This one plays quite the wild card. It's narrated by the teenage Wonder Girl, whom I freed from the clutches of Giganta, the nemesis of the Amazons. And Wonder Girl is telling us about it not in a comic book, but in the medium of her generation: a personal blog.

One of the most poignant things about reading comic books as a kid is the sense of identification, however vicarious, they give to you at an age when you really don't know who the hell you are, much less what you'll become. You're an incomplete, very emotional person with this vague hope, masquerading as a faith, that you'll become someone who matters. And the primary-color, transdimensional struggles comic books present are not so much allegories for the woes of the world at large; they speak to your more prosaic conflicts, ones you typically encounter in school.

Fakes and liars. Cheaters and bullies. Manipulators and oppressors. They are the enemies of the world, no matter how old you are. It's a cosmic indictment rendered in the profound vocabulary of a high school yearbook. And Wonder Girl's kicker, her goddam-right punchline, set to that music, gets me every time.

I'm a 37-year-old man, nowhere close to whom this presumably speaks to, and when I saw this I jumped out of my chair, stabbing a No. 1 finger in the air. This is why I created a superhero character and lived the past 10 days through him. I felt like I was 13 again, a dumb kid caught in a study-hall daydream. I'm running down the street and straight into the air, flying in to save the day, to defeat the oppressors, the manipulators, the bullies, cheaters, liars and fakes, all of them. Wherever or whoever they are.