There are two more reasons to pick up an NVIDIA Shield handheld game console. Valve is now offering two of its classic PC games for $10 each. Portal and Half-Life 2 are now both available for NVDIA’s $199 game system.

You can purchase and download the games from the Google Play Store, but that doesn’t mean they’ll run on any old Android phone or tablet. These are Shield-exclusives… at least for now.

half life 2

The good news for fans of the games that don’t feel like spending money on a Shield is that now that the titles have been ported to Android, it theoretically shouldn’t be that hard for Valve (or maybe some independent hackers) to get the game running on other Android devices with NVIDIA Tegra 4 processors.

Of course, if you’re already a fan of the game, odds are you’ve already played it and you don’t necessarily need to spend $10 to play it again… but for folks who haven’t played one of these titles, they include high-quality graphics, storylines, and puzzle solving features, which helps set them apart from the sea of $0.99 and free-to-play games (with in-app purchases) available in the Google Play Store.

Still, it’s interesting that some of the best games available for Android are PC games that have been available on other platforms for 7 or more years. Mobile gaming clearly still has some catching up to do.

via Android Central

 

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5 replies on “PC classics Portal, Half Life 2 get new life on the NVIDIA Shield”

  1. Can’t wait to see someone make a handheld console using the next SOC from Intel. Iv’e been watching native PC games being played on Baytrail tablets, simply awesome.

    If I was Intel, it wouldn’t hurt to release a handheld with their next SOC as a look at me, check out what I can do – native PC gaming.

  2. I’m thinking were going to see alot of spin-off development out of this. Maybe a mobile version of Counterstrike? Porting the HL2 engine to ARM is a fairly big undertaking, for only selling 2 titles on a single device.

    1. Probably… back in March of last year, Valve representatives at a GPU Technology Conference in Germany stated that Games on Linux are (only) a stepping stone to Games on Android…

      Problem with a direct port is the overhead of the Direct3D interface is simply too large but it’s much easier once the game is ported to Linux with OpenGL, Linux optimized drivers, etc…

      So, since the Source Engine has been available to Linux for well over a year now we can now start seeing games becoming available to not only Linux… Like Steam For Linux, but also Android…

      Provided the Android system has the performance to run the game of course and that’s still pushing the highest end offerings at the moment just to play these older games… While, we’ll have to see what becomes available on Linux first before we see wider distribution of PC games on Android…

        1. Right now, they’re only releasing Half Life 2 in addition to Portal, but anything available on Steam for Linux can be pretty easily ported to Android too… Though, they may wait for options like Nvidia K1 before really pushing the newer games…

          So yeah, it won’t be that long before you can opt to play HL3 on a Android device…

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