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.

DC Universe Online is meant to be grind-free; players will advance by completing missions, not menial tasks. So what's an MMO novice to do when he hits a tough mission, and can't simply level up to overwhelm it?

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

When last we left our combustible biathlete, Ballisto had hit level 10. Still a little unsure of the correct way to proceed, if there is one, I focused the second week on leveling further, while mixing in more cooperative gameplay elements.

There's two ways to do this. You can invite people to group up and take down a guy who's giving you problems. If you work well with these folks, someone can suggest that the group extends that into a legion status, more or less a persistent team-up, or clan for those who play these more than I do.

There's also a game mode called Alerts, in which (for heroes) Martian Manhunter puts out a distress call for you to pitch in with others. It's a good introduction to structured cooperative play without forcing you to do all the organization yourself.

How It Went

I answered a call for Area 51 and was dispatched there to beat some Brainiac robot ass galore. Brought in as a damage-dealer instead of a Tank, I didn't have much difficulty with the assignments, which break down to kicking minions' asses or destroying their assets, followed by taking out a series of bosses. Cooperative play proceeded roughly like a random encounter in Metropolis when everyone's going after the same objectives. I didn't hear much coordination of powers and roles, just everyone jumping in for a good time. The group loot we got was unimpressive and not worth the greed-or-need call.

Back in the main world my journeys now took me to Gotham City, which is a color negative of bright, gleaming (if a bit beat up in spots) Metropolis. Gotham is perpetually in a state of gloom, occasionally with rain, playing to type of course. This part of the map was considerably tougher on me as I slogged from levels 12 to 15, taking out Bane at the lighthouse in a spirited battle.

In my first MMO log, the only character who'd given me much trouble was Queen Bee, and that's because I fought about a level under her. Two levels above Harley Quinn and the Funhouse mission, I was getting pounded by the Joker's knife-throwing goons. Harley herself was a real bi- well, bear. She goes into a hammer-thrower's whirl that's tough to break.

I backed out of the Funhouse and reconsidered my situation. A few invites to tackle Harley went nowhere, as by now most of the serious players are level 20 or above and she's small fry to them. So I learned another fundamental truth of MMOs: Know your powers, how they interact with each other, spec them purposefully and have a strategy.

I went to the Justice Society tower and respec'd Ballisto, branching differently in my immolation and ignition power trees to mix their effects. Many of the powers have an advanced effect on a burning enemy, so I arrayed them in my tray more strategically. In other words, I was going to go in and set someone on fire, then either use the detonate power, or the heat drain to maximize the damage effect.

Skills - in weapons and movement - become considerably more important as there's no power cost associated with them. I discarded some earlier bad choices and loaded up on melee and range combos, avoiding the power talents (there's a whirlwind you can create that pulls your enemy closer to you. As a guy with a bow and arrow, selecting that one was kind of dumb.)

Back in the Funhouse, with a greater sense of myself I sat on block and defensive moves and toughed it out against Harley Quinn, finally taking her down with a detonation combo (basically, I caught her on fire, and moved in with a close range explosive attack that multiplied its effect thanks to her conflagrant state.) I gave a deep sigh, happy to know that this game hadn't plateaued because of a single difficult enemy, I was just a novice who needed to learn how to fight.

It was time to get out of Gotham and clean up some unfinished business. But first, I was invited to a group excursion against some of Poison Ivy's minions. You'll see it in the video below. Lo and behold, Solomon Grundy wandered by, and I'd answered a wanted poster to take his ass down. The party turned its focus toward him. But not to me.

I was knocked out twice going after the big guy, and as the lowest level player in the party, is there any, I don't know, etiquette regarding helping a brother out? Twice they failed to resuscitate me - the last time, my compatriot apparently forgot which button revives a comrade (hint: it's circle.) The KO timer expired right as Grundy was taken down, giving me the feat and the XP. You can see it in that video below.

The Story So Far

I am now at Level 18. My frustrations with the game - the map (which displays two objective arrows at inconvenient times), the manual labor required to activate and redeem certain missions, the near radio-silence you're in as a console player - are likely aggravated by being a complete newcomer to the game. The loot I have gathered is across-the-board unimpressive; I'm proceeding incrementally both in experience and in gear. The money I acquire buys health, more or less.

The game seems built toward hitting level 30, something I hope to do in the next week. At 30, you unlock Duo missions and Raids in the game's multiplayer settings, and can avail yourself of badass armor sets on display up in the tower.

There is still a ton of game left to go in this, and when I came back from Gotham to my Metropolis turf to clean out some missions, I found that I'd gotten a better sense of how to handle this action MMO, to mix in defense, and to approach missions with more than a button mashing instinct - although this game still conditions you to do plenty of it.

My goals for the next week will be to create a villain character and explore an early chunk of that continuity; invite or join more group activities and get a spot in a legion, and ultimately hit level 30. Tall order for someone trying to get to bed before midnight, but Batman willing and the creek don't rise, I'll get there.

As a boy my paper route money went to comic books, stories of people coming to terms with their strange powers and their place in the world. With D.C. Universe Online, I now take that journey for myself.

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.

Having never done an MMO log before, I'm going to begin with a summary of my first experiences in D.C. Universe Online, figuring that a lot of what I consider profound early on might be made moot by later experience. In subsequent weeks I'll go through my experiences in a more journaled format.

What I Played

D.C. Universe Online may intrigue some because of how, as a complex MMO, it will be handled using the tools of a traditional console. For me, anything is going to be new, but everything here was undertaken with a standard PS3 DualShock controller - no USB keyboard or other peripherals.

Powers and talents are therefore mapped to the face and R1/L1 buttons with the L2/R2 buttons as modifiers. L2 activates one of four powers out of the left side of your "tray" in the heads up display; R2 equips items such as health out of the right four slots of the tray. The D-pad is used for chat, gestures and canned interaction (lacking a chatpad this week, I kept quiet, or bowed and waved to folks).

I focused my first two days of gameplay (Monday and Tuesday) on indvidual experiences, developing additional powers and understanding what I could do, what I couldn't do, and what was inadvisible in this world. More complex, cooperative engagements such as group raids would come later, I decided, after I'd built a methodology for the combat system and a set of attributes and powers supporting it.

As of the time of writing, I've finished more than 30 missions, solo completing two quests (if the tutorial counts, three) plus several side missions that were built to introduce players to Metropolis. I'm a level 10 metahuman, with a smirk and a compound bow. I run like lightning and burn like fire. Name's Ballisto.

How It Went

My original name was Lawn Dart. About six levels in, I learned one of the hard truths about MMO character creation - pick a name you can live with. I slapped "Lawn Dart" on my Flash/Green Arrow hybrid ("not Lawn Dart Lad?" asked McWhertor) expecting to take an ironic tour of duty for truth, justice, and cookouts. Instead I took a real pride in what my hero was doing, and elected to just start all over, redoing the first quest in the process. You can't rename a character, but there seemed to be no restriction on creating more than one.

The quick rundown: as Ballisto, I'm a hero (players may choose to be villains). My means of travel is lightning speed (flight and acrobatics are the others.) Fire is my power type (the others are ice, gadgets, mental, sorcery and nature) and I'm a metahuman, which means someone whose power comes from a mutation or alteration. Other types are tech (getting their powers from gadgets) or magic (mystical beings).

The tutorial stage, which many of you have played thanks to the game's pre-release beta, introduces you to the combat system of an action MMO. I don't think it can be failed, but I didn't try to, either. Superman and I cleaned out a space station crawling with Brainiac's mechanized trashcans, and then it was on to Earth.

It wasn't apparent to me in what order I should be doing things, so I just jumped right into action after being introduced to the police station, a base of operations where everyone trades in loot, picks up missions and shows off for the other players. For herose, the first quest - Gorilla Grodd's assault on the Metropolis boardwalk and downtown financial sector - comprises a meaty 10-plus missions, taking me to level 6 by its conclusion.

D.C. Universe Online points out that its progression is built on the completion of missions, not leveling, meant to reduce grind. I still found that the missions in the Grodd quest and the Queen Bee quest following it had their own types of grind - go here, kill this many bad guys, smash this many assets.

At peak hours in the early missions, you would be competing with many other players trying to bag the same 10 Gorilla Lieutenants or Royal Bees or whatever. There's usually a race to the unique character type you need to kill and then a fury of button-mashing, hoping to bring him down. I wasn't sure how someone got credit for a kill, whether it was landing the last punch or what.Monday evening I hit some pretty nasty lag and decided to come back later. Tuesday at the same time the issues were gone.

At the end of the Grodd quest I met the Flash, a treasured boyhood hero. All of the D.C. Universe characters I've encountered are well voiced, but Flash especially so. I left that mission looking forward to more. In the Queen Bee quest's final interior stage I learned that I could tackle the objectives with a measure of stealth (or speed) rather than overcoming every guard and then activating the objective behind him.

Not so for the Queen herself, who was unusually tough on me, but I was fighting at least one level underweight. So there were a lot of "knock outs" (as opposed to deaths) which, in a boss's case, starts the battle over rather than saving your progress on your enemies as in other missions.

By the end of the second quest I hadn't pursued the easy sightseeing quests offered in the police station, which give load you up with XP toward one or two skill and power points, plus gear. I mopped those missions after beating Zazzala. It could be my lack of exposure to the genre but I didn't feel a strong sense of "You should do this now," in the game. Experienced players probably pick up the cues more, so the hands-off approach is likely a virtue.

One thing I didn't appreciate is the game's radar, which would occasionally fail to materialize waypoints in the explorations. This led to some pretty frustrating wanderings around the Watchtower, especially. The Grodd campaign likewise didn't do a good job of pointing me over to the pier, which is where I was supposed to smash some gorilla teleporters. I took care of that long after I finished the overal quest, just for laughs.

Other pastimes included two speedster races outside the police station (I assume flight/acrobatic races are available for those types), a trip to the Vault (sort of booby-prize warehouse you can visit once a day for free random gear) and a visit to the PvP Legends arena to fight as Robin against Harley Quinn. I got my ass kicked badly there.

Ballisto/Owen Meets She-Ra, Gives Her (Him?) The Creeps

The Story So Far

I'm very happy with my character, as the fast restart to give him a name he deserves should indicate. (Ballisto is identical to Lawn Dart in power makeup). The idea of creating a superhero whose powers would manifest themselves later was a little anxious for someone who spent a lot of his youth inventing super characters on rainy days.

I think in fantasy MMOs people understand the concept of acquiring power and talent, starting with very little. Superhero tales involve a character fully formed from the origin issue, with a set of integrated powers and abilities that largely fit a theme. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about starting with very little and then picking from powers that, while advantageous in the game, maybe didn't fit whatever narrative I'd crafted for myself.

Not so with Ballisto. Though I regret not being able to float around Metropolis - it really looks awesome seeing a caped being soar silently overhead - super-speed suits me more. The fire powers I've taken support my longbow attack. They're becoming second nature to me: usually fireball, followed by immolation to give a hotfoot to anyone kicking my ass. I have a health drain attack and a trick shot that calls down a volley of arrows, among other surprises. Probably the one skill I use least is block or evade. There's a lot of button pressing in action MMOs, but that's one I forget to spam or even use purposefully.

I'm very much looking forward to going back into Metropolis once I finish work tonight, and staying up late with this game. In the next week I'll seek out cooperative engagements and more PvP action, in addition to continuing the quests laid out in this expansive game. For now, I think D.C. Universe Online has satisfied something that many comic books failed to do in my youth: You have to create characters with more than cool names or powers. They must be likeable. And I like my guy a lot.

After four days of impassable, ice-covered roads the mail finally made it through, and the Batman statue Sony Online Entertainment sent has arrived. Can you believe it came with DC Universe Online packed inside?

At least it arrived before the weekend, right? I was certain the roads around my neighborhood wouldn't be clear until Monday up until the FedEx guy knocked at my door. He told me that they've been delivering since yesterday, but since no one had done anything to help melt the ice covering the road outside my apartment, they were forced to pass me by.

Time to move. I hear California is nice and snow-less.

Sony Online Entertainment's massively multiplayer superhero game DC Universe Online launched yesterday, and I was not there to see it. What diabolical villain kept me from playing a major MMO release on day one?

What you are looking at is enough snow to cause a major metropolitan area to grind to a halt. It may not look like much to folks living in Northern regions, but for a city where this much frozen precipitation falls maybe once every ten years, this is plenty.

There's a copy of DC Universe Online headed my way, but the post office has been closed for the past three days due to icy road conditions. So has FedEx. UPS revealed this morning that they would attempt to deliver three days' worth of packages today, but are leaving delivery decisions up to driver discretion. Looking outside I see cars sliding down the main road outside of my apartment complex, so I'm pretty sure our driver is going to discretion right past us.

The whole ordeal speaks volumes on the merits of digital distribution. Had I ordered the game online I would have been playing since last night, though with no Chinese food or pizza delivery operating in my area it just wouldn't have been the same.

The sun is out today, but with the temperature hovering at 24 degrees the chances of the ice going away is relatively slim. Hopefully I'll be playing by the weekend. Until then, I'll find other ways to keep myself amused.

One would think that after more than 70 years of fighting crime on Earth, someone would have worked up the courage to tell Kal-El he was wearing his underwear wrong. Behold Superman, in all his DC Universe Online glory.

I guess when a guy is strong enough to bench press the planet you allow him his little eccentricities. At least he's keeping them clean. I'm just wondering if he keeps an extra pair of underwear under the costume, or is he just rocking it semi-commando? The world may never know, out of some really raunchy fan art.

DC Universe Online launches next week, and Sony Online Entertainment saved the big man for last. Memorize his face; you'll be seeing a lot of him should you venture into the massively multiplayer comic book realm come January 11.

The DC Universe Online beta goes out with a bang today, with tonight's cataclysmic "Battle of the Legends" paving the way for the MMO's January 11 launch. Will you side with Batman and Superman, or The Joker and Lex Luthor?

The end of beta testing is a big event for a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, the last hurrah before the servers are wiped clean and everyone starts fresh on launch day. Sony Online Entertainment plans on making this one memorable, giving players the chance to take part in the biggest battles the game has yet seen. Superman faces off against Lex Luthor. Batman and The Joker stage a major showdown. Comics legend Jim Lee takes on IGN.

Yeah, that last bit was a little puzzling to me as well. Apparently Jim Lee, AKA Future Batman, will be taking on some of IGN writers during the event, with regular beta testers able to join the battle to help one side or the other triumph.

Check out the complete schedule for U.S. PlayStation 3 and PC servers:

US Beta Servers - Wednesday January 5
PC BETA 1 / Wednesday January 5 / 5PM PT / Botanical Gardens (Batman vs. Joker) or Centennial Park (Superman vs. Lex)
PS3 BETA 2 / Wednesday January 5 / 5PM PT / Botanical Gardens (Batman vs. Joker) or Centennial Park (Superman vs. Lex)
PC BETA 3 / Wednesday January 5 / 6PM PT / Botanical Gardens (Batman vs. Joker) or Centennial Park (Superman vs. Lex) *Come join the battle and fight alongside or against Jim Lee aka Future Batman in this event as he takes on Greg Miller from IGN and his league of wanna be villains!
PS3 BETA 3 / Wednesday January 5 / 6PM PT / Botanical Gardens (Batman vs. Joker) or Centennial Park (Superman vs. Lex)
PC BETA 4 / Wednesday January 5 / 7PM PT / Botanical Gardens (Batman vs. Joker) or Centennial Park (Superman vs. Lex)
PS3 BETA 1 / Wednesday January 5 / 7PM PT / Botanical Gardens (Batman vs. Joker) or Centennial Park (Superman vs. Lex) *Once again, fight against Jim Lee aka The Future Joker, as he attempts to spawn chaos across the Universe!

If you can't make it, don't fret: The DC Universe Online Facebook page will be tracking the battles' progress, keeping you abreast of what you're missing.

I'll try to make it on tonight, though I can't guarantee anything. With CES getting underway, I might not have the time. Fingers crossed!