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Tech

Watch Some Guy Play 'Half-Life' on a Smartwatch

Gaming in about one square inch.
Rachel Pick
New York, US

For anyone that's ever wondered what it'd be like to play Half-Life on a tiny smartwatch, wonder no more.

YouTuber Dave Bennett has managed to get the visually dense first-person shooter to play on his Android Wear, and the result is surprisingly coherent.

Bennett is using an app called SDLash, which emulates the Goldsource engine that Half-Life was designed to run on and enables the game to boot up on the watch. The visuals are crisp, and the framerate is anywhere from 2 to 60 frames per second, depending on how complicated the graphics get. You can use the onscreen controls to navigate, but it's not easy considering the small size of the screen.

Bennett has a whole series of videos showing you how to play games like Portal and Team Fortress Classic on Android phones, but this is his first attempt at running a game on a smartwatch. He's clearly doing this just for fun, saying "[it's] not an ideal gaming situation, only proof of concept…and you're gonna run into some crashing."

Still, it's a neat party trick—depending on what kinds of parties you get invited to.