Last month I announced UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune, an original PS Vita title building on the UNCHARTED universe, was going to launch exclusively on the PlayStation Store in December. I’m here now to let everyone know that you can download it today!

UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune is an action-adventure turn based card game featuring all the heroes and villains that you have met throughout the UNCHARTED games, including UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss on PS Vita, which directly ties into your experience in Fight For Fortune.

The learning curve for card games can be steep, but rest assured we spent a considerable amount of time in the early design of UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune to make sure it was going to be easy to learn, engaging and a whole lot of fun to play. You will be playing within minutes of booting up the game.

The first thing you will probably want to do once you launch UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune is kick off the Fortune Hunter single player campaign. This campaign features more than eight hours of gameplay that will be spent playing against various characters from UNCHARTED, and the first couple games will teach you everything you need to know — with a gentle learning curve.

Games you win in the campaign will unlock not only Trophies, but also new items including characters, weapons and armor, artifact cards, and player avatars and backgrounds. Use them to customize the game to suit your personality, and use the items to create powerful combos to devastate your opponent.

Speaking of unlocks, everyone who’s played UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss, in the last month can start powering up and collecting cards for use immediately in UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune! You’ll just need to make sure that Fight For Fortune is installed on the same memory card as your Golden Abyss save, and you will be good to go. Already collected everything? No worries, just launch UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss to receive your cards and they will all be available automatically in UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune.

If that wasn’t enough to keep you busy, UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune also includes competitive asynchronous multiplayer. Play against your friends in the same room with a Pass & Play option, or over a WiFi / 3G connection via matchmaking competitions. Impress your friends and start making a name for yourself on the leaderboards (which reset monthly) today.

UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune is available today on PlayStation Store for $4.99. It includes all your favorite heroes, villains, weapons, and artifacts from UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune, UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss, and the motion comic UNCHARTED: Eye of Indra.

Although you’ll have more than 100 cards to unlock and Trophies to collect, we didn’t stop there. Available immediately are expansion packs for $1.99 $2.99 each that bring both UNCHARTED: Among Thieves and UNCHARTED: Drake’s Deception to the table, bringing along with it expansions to the single player campaign, more unlockables, and of course even more Trophies to earn.

Download the trial today and find out for yourself what this new UNCHARTED experience is all about. I look forward to putting your new-found strategies to the test online!

UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune is an action-adventure turn-based card game featuring the heroes and villains from the UNCHARTED universe. Take a look at the new trailer of the game below to give you an idea of how combat works.

So you’re probably wondering, how exactly does Fight For Fortune work? I’ll explain. The core gameplay in UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune involves creating a team of Faction cards featuring heroes, villains, and mercenaries from the UNCHARTED universe, then using that team to defeat your opponent while defending yourself from their attacks.

Each Faction card can be equipped with powerful Resource and valuable Fortune cards, which enhance their stats and give them special abilities. Once you’ve selected and equipped a card, it’s time to head into battle! During combat, attacks either reduce the health of opposing Faction cards or the health of your opponent. Defeating an opposing Faction card removes it from play, while reducing the health of your opponent to zero wins you the game.

The rich lore that surrounds the UNCHARTED universe gave us the opportunity to create UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss, complete with lush, artifact-filled environments. With over 300 treasures to be found, we wanted to find a way to allow our fans to delve deeper into the artifact collections and mysteries of the UNCHARTED universe.

Along with the release of UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune, we will also release a new patch for UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss that will power up the artifacts that you’ve collected for immediate use within Fight for Fortune. Using the artifacts found within Golden Abyss, you can go to battle with other players as well as AI opponents. The game can also be played independently of Golden Abyss, so owning the PS Vita title is not required.

Bend Studio Co-Director John Garvin and I have led the charge on UNCHARTED: Fight for Fortune since the launch of Golden Abyss to take the mobile UNCHARTED experience even further. In addition to our close collaboration with Naughty Dog, we are also pleased to introduce One Loop Games, a team of talented industry veterans who worked closely with us to chart new ground into the UNCHARTED universe.

UNCHARTED: Fight For Fortune is launching December 4 for $4.99 on PS Vita. There will be much more to talk about as we quickly approach the launch date, including some great additional DLC on launch day, so keep your PS Vita handy and get ready to go fortune hunting!

The reviews we have been receiving have been fantastic and over the past 6 months we have been enjoying watching the player community steadily grow as more players start to hear about the game. To date there have been over 6,800 missions uploaded from players and shared within the Combat Ops community!

My “favorites” mission list in the game consists of only player created missions now and the team is extremely excited at the prospect of the community and number of missions growing very quickly this next month with the newly released God of War PSP bundle where Syphon Filter: Combat Ops is being offered as a promotional free download.

I hope to see you all online soon. Here are a few more screen shots if you haven’t seen them yet.

Hi everyone. I wanted to let everyone know that Syphon Filter: Combat Ops was recently released on the PLAYSTATION Store for PC, where you can now download it to your PSP. Hopefully many of you were able to see a sneak preview of Combat Ops that we included on the UMD release of Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow, but in the event that you haven’t let me tell you a little more about what to expect with it.

Syphon Filter: Combat Ops builds on the 8-player infrastructure and ad-hoc multiplayer game that was first released with Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and now recently Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow. In the sneak preview we unveiled a glimpse of the new mission modifier that sets Combat Ops apart from the Syphon Filter multiplayer that everyone has been enjoying. The sneak preview allowed players to create missions from one of the modifiable maps and play those maps against friends via an ad-hoc connection. With the full version of the game that can now be purchased and downloaded from the PLAYSTATION Store, you will now be able to choose from 4 customizable maps to create multiplayer missions. For me, the most exciting part is that those missions can be uploaded to the online community that can be shared and played with other fellow players via an infrastructure WiFi connection.

Players in the community will now be able to provide feedback on the missions that have been submitted to the community with the new rating system that has been incorporated, allowing everyone to vote on how much they liked or disliked the mission they just played.

The community features have been expanded to let you know when you log in what new missions have been uploaded, which missions are being played the most, and which missions have been rated highly by the player community. My personal challenge is going to see if I can get one of my favorite missions I have created on the Top 10 list!

As a huge fan of playing multiplayer action games, the emphasis behind Syphon Filter: Combat Ops was to develop an easy-to-use mission modifier that not only provided the tools to create a mission in a matter of minutes, but allow me to take my favorite mission I have been playing online and make a few extra desired tweaks to create the “perfect” mission – and then upload it back to the community.

Another fun feature in Combat Ops that wasn’t part of the sneak preview is the addition of unlockables as you rank up, based on your performance playing ranked matches with other players online. I will keep the nature of the unlockables a surprise for now, but I will say that they will provide added content for missions you create with the mission modifier. I am really looking forward to playing in some of those missions!

Another exciting element for Combat Ops is the introduction of the use of the PLAYSTATION Network. When logging into Combat Ops via infrastructure WiFi, you will now be able to use your PLAYSTATION Network ID, the same ID that you use to login to your PS3 with. This immediately allows you to connect with friends in Combat Ops that are currently part of your PLAYSTATION Network Friends list!

For those that want to just jump into the heat of the battle and play online without creating a mission, rest assured that beyond the community created missions, the team here at SCEA Bend Studio has created 20 missions that are available immediately to play. We had a lot of fun building and play testing these missions, but feel free to download and modify them to make them even better. It won’t hurt our feelings, too much :)

I look forward to seeing you all online.

Hey everyone, I’m the technical director for SCEA’s Bend studio in Oregon, the developer of the Syphon Filter franchise. We’re working hard on the next chapter in the series, Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow for PSP, but I wanted to take some time to give a glimpse into how the PSP’s recently expanded processor speed (333MHz) will help us deliver a look and feel that wasn’t possible under the previous 266MHz limit.

For Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror, our concentration was developing an engine that could produce stunning PSP visuals, allowing for significant detail in the environments. For Logan’s Shadow, we naturally wanted to push the detail even further with our focus turning towards interactivity within those environments.

Now we have the ability to introduce Havok physics, water rendering/gameplay (as seen in the screenshot above), larger environments with significantly more interactive elements, and faster AI response times. In short, tapping into the full processor speed of PSP offers increased gameplay opportunities, while still providing the high production qualities you would expect after playing Dark Mirror.

I can’t wait until you see for yourself the difference that 333MHz makes when you get your hands on Logan’s Shadow this fall.