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.