Smartwatches are fast becoming the norm, so it was almost inevitable that someone would eventually kit out their wrist with a wearable console. Whether the idea is a good one is debatable, but a Reddit user by the name of u/ZenonDesingk has gone ahead and done it anyway, claiming a stable 60fps in games like GTA: Vice City and Clash of Clans, even managing to get Forza Horizon 4 up and running.
What about Crysis?
This is just a regular smartwatch? No.
byu/ZenonDesingk inGalaxyWatch
It’s an incredible, somewhat useless achievement that commits the cardinal sin of not booting up Doom on the bloody thing. Still, considering what the user was working with – a Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 (44mm) – with a PSP emulator loaded on, we can safely assume that his smartwatch could run Doom with minimal effort. TechRadar reached out to the user to ask the most important question: why?
“One day at school, I noticed that one of my friends was using a Samsung Galaxy Watch 5,” Zenon said, before immediately rushing out to get his own smartwatch and take advantage of the Google Play capabilities it offered, but was initially met with disappointment. “I was surprised to find that the games were uninteresting and pretty bad,” they said.
Unsurprisingly, Zenon was disappointed with the games the Galaxy Watch can run without first sticking in some sort of emulator. “But I didn’t let that get me down because, after all, this is Android! You can do anything you want,” he continued. And thus, whatever that is, was born.
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After some tinkering first, of course. Zenon’s first idea didn’t involve an emulator at all, achieving basic playability on games like Clash of Clans and Jetpack Joyride through several attempts via Android Debug Bridge, and a tool by the name of Bugjaeger. But he wanted more. Only then did it occur to him to boot up a PSP emulator, which solved the issues and enabled GTA, Mortal Kombat, and NFS: Most Wanted with no issues.
Other than playing GTA: Vice City with the minuscule on-screen controls on the 1.4in display. Fortunately, hooking up a gamepad was all it took to sort out the trouble, and allowed Zenon to play his games comfortably and in most cases, at a stable 60fps – beating out the Switch’s abilities on the remastered version. The only game that couldn’t keep up with the frame rate was God of War which stuck closer to 30fps.
“Naturally, all of this was just a temporary enthusiasm that lasted a few days. After a couple of weeks, I reset the watch and started using it as a normal watch again,” he said. A tragic end to arguably the coolest smartwatch out there for a couple of weeks that’s sure to be replicated and even perfected in the coming weeks. Perhaps they’ll have the decency to treat us to some Doom action.
