DC Universe Online (Europeans Keep Away)

2009 is Superhero MMO year, it seems. Which, after the unending plague of fantasy MMOs over the last couple of years, is something to look forward to. We'll hopefully be talking more about Champions Online, the sequel of sorts to City of Heroes (and, if rumour is to be believed, is new life spawned from Marvel Universe Online's corpse) pretty soon, but also rearing its cowled head is DC Universe Online.

I have only the foggiest knowledge of who's who's in the DCU outside of the Justice League folks, and my attempts to decipher the Wikipedia page about the current big crossover storyline, Final Crisis, almost hospitalised me, but presumably DCUO is a terribly exciting idea.

It's coming through SOE, and it sounds as though there'll be a big reveal at this year's Comicon. There's to be a DCUO party and Jim "tiny feet, big boobies" Lee will be there talking about his involvement with the game's art. Fortunately, our own Mister Gillen will be at the show letting Phonogram groupies stroke his beard, so hopefully he'll be able to bring us a front-line report on the announcements. Meantime, there's some imagery to run your ocular organs over at its official Myspace page. Which, if you're in Europe, redirects to the myspace.com frontpage. A sensible decision, really. Imagine if Europeans found out a game was being released - OH NO!

Fortunately, someone's stuck the a video slideshow of all the released art onto Youtube:

So far so City of Heroes, it seems. Sounds as though there'll be no playing as the Man of Bats or The Man Who Is Super or The Wonderful Woman, unfortunately. A shame, but creating custom heroes does seem to be the only practical approach to this dilemma. Expect a plague of Batt-Mann_343872s nevertheless.