LG Optimus 2X runing Unreal Engine 3

When one talks about gaming, most of the time the first thing which will pop in your mind will be a desktop PC with green, red LEDs glowing around it and all that lovely jazz. Maybe you’ll be thinking of a gaming console, like the Xbox 360 or the Play Station 3, but you wouldn’t really consider a smartphone as such a gaming related thing. Sure there are games, but most of them are there to keep us occupied for a while, most of them are there to just fill the time while taking the bus to work or school, maybe give us a couple of hours of entertainment. The reason behind this is largely due to the processors, the memory and the GPU which can fit into a computer, but still has issues fitting into a smartphone. Or does it?

LG’s Optimus 2X has been one of my favorite devices ever since I saw it’s first image and it’s first specs on the great wide web. Being the world’s first dual-core processor, showing that LG can make high-end premium smartphones not only mid-range devices, the Optimus 2X shocked a lot of the audience. In a recent review I saw it run a large number of games with ease, but what will happen if you’ll try to run a serious gaming engine, like the legendary Unreal Engine 3. Some might know that it has been used on quite a lot of games, the one which is probably most well known being dungeon defense. The tech demo “Epic Citadel” is available for example on the iPhone for a while but hasn’t been released for the Android platform.

Thanks to Tecnophone, an Italian tech site, the world saw the first images of the LG Optimus 2X running “Epic Citadel” on the phone and on a connected HDTV, all at the same time. The demo does look really impressive on the large screen, but the most impressive element is that it’s being run by a simple handheld device. The engine has powered quite a few titles for the iOS platform, amongst which we could mention Infinity Blade and Dungeon Defenders, and the fact that the same product is running so well on an Android device shows the power of Android gaming.

Epic Games’ Vice President, Jay Wilbur did give an interview to the gaming page Slowdown.vg a while back in which he discussed the possibility of us seeing some titles from the developer for the Android OS. The interview touches the subject of porting the games, or developing whole new titles for Android yet the largest issue was the fact that the Android platform itself is far too fragmented as well as the marketplace itself. He did present a Samsung Galaxy S running Epic Citadel, yet the issue still remains that the developer is not sure of how well its products would fair on the Android Market as it’s still too fragmented, that being the largest issue in this aspect.

This latest tech demo did show that Android devices have no problems in running the Unreal Engine 3 without any major problems even when hooked up to a HD television via the HDMI port. Now the only thing we as users have to wait for it to see some titles released on the platform as the latest modifications, patches and updates did help the platform in being more unitary as well as addressing a good portion of the fragmentation issues. Until next time, I’ll be busy dreaming about playing Epic Games on Epic Devices.1

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