MediaFile

Holy MMO, Batman! Sony Online Entertainment sure hopes DC Universe Online — the splashy new massively multiplayer online game that hit stores today – won’t share the fate of the caped crusaders’ legions of arch-villains over the past few decades.

Fans willing to shell out $59.99 upfront and then $14.99 a month can create their very own superhero and play — on PCs or Playstation 3s — much-loved characters from Superman to Batman and Wonder Woman, in locales eerily familiar to comic geeks from  Metropolis to Gotham City.

Reuters first reported back in 2008 about the arrival of the  world’s first licensed MMO comic book game. Tuesday’s launch is part of  Warner Bros’ and parent Time Warner Inc’s major push to fully exploit the DC brands in video games.

The game looks to tap the “tens of millions of action gamers who have never played massive multiplayer games before,” said John Blakely, vice president of development for Sony Online Entertainment, the division of Sony that produced the MMO pioneer EverQuest.

“When you log on to that server to Metropolis and there’s a thousand people in there working with you and against you, that’s something you’ve ever seen before on your action games,” Blakely said.

The ink has barely dried on AOL’s $850 million proposed purchase of Bebo, but reports of another deal are already percolating. AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher reports AOL is seriously considering buying New York-based widget-maker KickApps for $90 million.

KickApps makes widgets to order for a broad range of companies, such as a car search widget for Autobytel and a social community for Time Warner’s CW TV network’s “Gossip Girl,” Swisher says.

Investors Softbank Capital, Prism VentureWorks and Spark Capital and others have dropped $17 million into KickApps.