Once again, someone has decided to challenge the closed nature of a platform and run supposedly incompatible software on it. The early Doom games are a prime example, having been made to run in strange places such as printers and ATMs. Today, it’s the turn of another classic, Half-Life, and the hardware in question is an LG G Watch running Android Wear.
Escaping the Walled Garden
Buying a smartphone, tablet, or smartwatch is easy, but in the name of that ease, what we’re really getting is a prison. Users are forced to play in the manufacturer’s sandbox, give up a good portion of their data, limit the types of accessories they can use, and so on. However, the interesting thing is that we’re seeing more people determined to shatter those limits and escape the prison. Replacing the factory firmware with an external alternative is common these days, but we also love seeing code enthusiasts manage to run software completely foreign to those platforms. We’re supposed to have computers in our pockets and on our wrists: why not use them as such?.
Half-Life on the Wrist
Dave Bennett did exactly that, though in a very special way. He took an LG G Watch and, with the help of the SDLash3D application (which can emulate the GoldSource engine), managed to run a copy of Half-Life — the title that kicked off Gordon Freeman’s epic story and that Valve seems unwilling to finish. On his official site you can find the full tutorial to reproduce the result on your own smartwatch, and when it works well, Bennett reports the game hits a commendable 30 FPS. Of course, this implementation of Half-Life has plenty of rough edges and crashes fairly often, not to mention the nightmare that is the controls. I’m convinced nobody wants to escape Black Mesa with a touchscreen.
It’s very likely this method will extend to other Half-Life games, including Blue Shift, Opposing Force, and classic Counter-Strike. The Bluetooth connectivity of smartwatches should open the possibility of pairing some kind of gamepad with the games, but I figure that will demand additional tweaks.
