Having been a hardcore PC and console gamer all his life, this passion is now applied to Android gaming and writing about it. When not playing or writing about Android games, he spends his time with is wife and son.
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While traditional Internet wisdom tells us that no gadget is worth its salt unless it can run Doom-see the likes of the TI-85 calculator, the Commodore 64, and an ancient Kodak digital camera-time and technology moves on.
Ardent Half-Life fans have discovered that it can be played on a smartwatch. Originally, Bennett got Half-Life working on other Android devices, then realized that the same process could get the game running on an Android Watch. He’s using the SDLash app, which emulates the GoldSource engine, allowing Bennett to port over a number of older titles like Team Fortress Classic, in addition to Half-Life. As he notes in the video above, it’s hard to use the controls on the small screen, and the frame rate varies widely from 30fps to 2fps, plus there are the occasional crashes. “Also, swiping to the left causes the screen to go back to the previous window”. “Are you still interested in doing this?”
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For years, the ability to run Doom on various devices has been a hallmark of a system’s flexibility. The original Half-Life isn’t multi-threaded in any fashion, so the game is running effectively on a single-core Cortex-A7 CPU and a DX9-class GPU. As entirely pointless as that is from a gameplay point of view, it’s quite the technical achievement.
