Half Life runs on Android Wear.
While traditional internet wisdom tells us that no gadget is worth its salt unless it can work Demise– see for example the TI-85 calculator, the Commodore 64 and an old Kodak digital camera – time and technology move on. These days, Demise is hardly a challenge. With that in mind, an enterprising modder has instead released Valve’s groundbreaking first-person-shooter classic Half-lifewith much more demanding 3D graphics, on an Android-powered LG G Watch.
Yes, instead of playing Half-life with a comfortable keyboard and mouse, you can now fiddle with tiny buttons on the touch screen and peer at a 1.65-inch screen on your wrist. Hurrah!
Okay, so play Half-life on a smartwatch is more of a proof of concept than something you’d actually want to do, but it just goes to show how fast wearable technology is evolving. To run the game on the LG G Watch, modder Dave Bennett used the SDLash app, which can emulate the GoldSource game engine used in Half-life.
“Sometimes the game reached as high as 30 FPS, and other times as low as 2 FPS,” Bennett writes on his blog. “Of course things like the lava graphics and special lighting caused a huge drop in FPS. Trying to play a game on Android Wear is also a nightmare in itself. The app offers touchscreen controls, but on a 1.65- inch screen, they are almost unusable. Also, if you swipe left, the screen will go back to the previous window. Are you still interested in doing this?”
Those who are can head over to Bennett’s blog and check out the full tutorial.
While Half-life is a natural successor to Demise for running games on things they were never designed for, id’s classic had one last hurray earlier this month. Modders managed to get Demiserun in Demise. As utterly pointless as that is from a gameplay point of view, it’s quite an engineering feat. Check out Ars’ post for all the dirty tech details.