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. These days, Doom is barely a challenge. With that in mind, an enterprising modder has instead got Valve's seminal first-person-shooter classic Half-Life, which features far more demanding 3D graphics, on an Android-powered LG G Watch.
Yes, instead of playing Half-Life with a comfy keyboard and mouse, you can now fumble around with tiny touch-screen buttons, and squint at a 1.65-inch screen on your wrist. Hooray!
OK, so playing Half-Life on a smartwatch is more proof of concept than something you'd actually want to do, but it just goes to show how quickly wearable tech is evolving. To get the game running on the LG G Watch, modder Dave Bennett used the SDLash app, which is able to emulate the GoldSource game engine used in Half-Life.
"At times, the game got as high as 30 FPS, and other times as low as 2 FPS," writes Bennett over on his blog. "Of course, things such as the lava graphics and special lighting caused a huge drop in FPS. Also, trying to play a game on Android Wear is a nightmare within itself. The app offers touchscreen controls, but on a 1.65-inch screen, they are almost impossible to use. Also, swiping to the left causes the screen to go back to the previous window. Are you still interested in doing this?"
Those that are can head over to Bennett's blog and check out the full tutorial.
While Half-Life is a natural successor to Doom for running games on things they were never designed for, id's classic had one last hurrah earlier this month. Modders managed to get Doom, running within Doom. As entirely pointless as that is from a gameplay point of view, it's quite the technical achievement. Check out Ars' post for all the dirty technical details.
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