It would need Mass Media Inc., a small studio dedicated solely to behind-the-scenes port work, taking games from their native platforms by other development houses and tweaking them to run on other platforms -- some vastly different from their native system. Mass Media began by breaking down the most mature code in Jak 3, then worked backwards, on Jak II and The Precursor Legacy, gussying up all three with a new coat of high-res textures and stereoscopic 3D. The result, as we saw from a hands-off demo of Jak II and 3, is damned impressive, though guided by the all-too familiar hands of Sony's Sam Thompson (who started working on the series with Jak II).

As with all HD collections, it's a little tough to recant the experience beyond "well, it plays just like the originals," and is made worse by the fact that these games were already technical marvels to begin with. Thompson admits that Mass Media had their work cut out for them when it came to upscaling the game's textures to something that would accommodate the series' new native 720p resolution, explaining that the games had two to three times more textures than the average PS2 title because of Naughty Dog's ability to stream them (and the rest of the world, which has seen a similar uptick in draw distance and level-of-detail complexity even far out).

To help facilitate things, Mass Media created an algorithm to help punch up the detail (or at least keep them from looking like a smeared mess) of every texture in the game, which they could then page through as needed to see which ones would take further work by hand. The effect is impressive, though the Jak series always did have a fairly clean, smooth look about it. The same sort of lightly painted effect is still here, buffed out into something that doesn't feel blurry as much as, well, stretched, and painted with an extra level of anti-aliasing.

We watched a couple of familiar scenes (the assault on the War Factory hovering over Haven City with an upgraded HellCat flyer in Jak 3 and exploring the Power Station and Mountain Temple in Jak II, for those curious), then were finally turned loose for the intro to Jak and Daxter where we played through the first mission in 3D. Because of the game's art style, the 3D effect was less pronounced than we're used to, but it gave everything a fairly decent amount of depth rather feeling like a series of cardboard cutouts. We didn't get an overwhelming sense of dimensionality to the world (odd given that it's a third-person game), but it was a little easier to pick out distance in the opening bits of platforming.

All in all, Mass Media's work on the games seems to have ported some of the most intrinsically-tied PS2 games out there to the PS3 with little in the way of stumbles. The games run at a smooth framerate, and though there weren't huge boosts given to the graphics of the world itself, we still came away with the impression that things were definitely stepped up for the better. We should have more detailed hands-on impressions in the next few weeks. Check back then!