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You can play Half-Life on a smartwatch if you really, really want to

Half-Life can be played on an Android Wear smartwatch. Yep. This is the glorious future.

Modder Dave Bennett has been working on getting Half-Life running on Android devices, and was struck by a sudden inspiration: could he make it go on Wear, Google's smartwatch operating system?

The answer is yes, although controlling the shooter on a tiny touch screen is a pain, and the frame rate sometimes bottoms out at 2 FPS, which is, uh, less than ideal.

In terms of raw power it's not surprising the tiny wearables can manage this. The first LG and Samsung Android Wear smartwatches are powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 400, with a top CPU speed of 1.7 GHz. One of the most popular CPUs for gaming PCs when Half-life launched in 1998 was the Pentium II, which topped out at 450 MHz.

Anyway, check it out in action below. You can learn more about the project on Bennett's blog, which will perhaps inspire you to try your own "X running on Y" projects. Remember DOOM on ATMs? Amazing scenes.

Cover image for YouTube video

Thanks, Ars Technica.

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About the Author
Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

Contributor

Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.

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