The God of War series has produced a number of brutal, critically acclaimed games on both the PlayStation 3 and the PSP. Now, with the upcoming release of God of War: Origins, you'll be able to play through the entire series on your PS3. The $40 package includes both portable God of War games, upgraded to run in full 1080p at 60 frames per second. It's a noticeable upgrade, to say the least.

We caught up with Ready at Dawn, the game's developer, to explore the work it takes to bring a PSP game to the PS3. It's not easy, but the results speak for themselves.

There is no easy way to make a PSP game look good on the PlayStation 3, but starting with good assets helps. "A lot of our textures were higher than what we really needed on the PSP, but we went through and we up-rezzed all the textures by four times and increased the polygons on all the models," Jeremy Nikolai, Senior Programmer at Ready at Dawn told Ars. The in-game assets were one thing, but the cinematics also required work. "Originally, we were planning on using the cinematics as-is, but that really didn't work. Our cinematics were originally rendered on the PSP, so we ported the cinematic renderer to the PS3 and re-rendered all the cinematics."

The higher resolution of the PS3 presented some problems with the visuals, and many of them had to be fixed manually. "Things that would only be a few pixels on the PSP, once we saw it at 1080p on the PS3, it was really obvious where it didn't hold up," Nikolai said. "The artists went through, found those spots, and cleaned it up."

It took 10 months, all told, to create the PS3 versions of these games.

Origins also adds stereoscopic 3D to both games, and this added an extra layer of complexity to the ports. With the set camera angles and movements of the God of War games, they were able to take information from the game's depth buffer and use that to determine the depth of the 3D effect on a scene-by-scene basis. Some special effects, such as particles and transparent objects, don't write to the depth buffer. These had to be fixed as well, to make sure the 3D effect is effective throughout the game. I was able to play a review version of the game in 3D, and it's an impressive effect; the scope of the games is even more apparent when environments have depth.

All these additions aren't simply cosmetic, as they improve how the game plays. "One thing that I think we got out of this is the game ran at 30fps, and with the extra performance we have it running at 60fps at 1080p," Phil Nowell, Lead Gameplay Programmer at Ready at Dawn, told Ars. "It feels so much smoother because of that."

He's right. In my time with the game I noticed how much smoother it both looks and feels. Doubling the framerate is no small thing in an action game, and it makes an impressive difference.

As I found myself replaying these games with the new updates, I was again reminded of how much I enjoyed them. If you've already played them on the PSP, the new graphics and 3D effects are a good reason to take another trip through the world. If this is your first time? You are in for a treat.

God of War: Origins is coming to the PS3 on September 13. Ready at Dawn wouldn't comment on the possibility of a port of the upgraded games to the Vita.