Portal: The Companion Collection was recently released on Nintendo Switch and already the modding community has found a way to run Half-Life 2 through the game.
As posted on Twitter, modder OatmealDome has discovered a way to get the sequel to Valve’s popular Half-Life running on the Switch. Using the copy of the original Portal included in Portal: The Companion Collection, they were able to edit in a playable version of Half-Life 2 using assets from NVIDIA Lightspeed Studios.
According to Oatmeal, the reason they could get the game working so quickly is that “Portal 1 is basically a glorified mod of Half-Life 2”. They went on to give the example that the Portal player code is based directly on the player code of Half-Life 2.
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The mod is by no means perfect. It crashes occasionally, not all of the maps are playable, NPC animations and world cameras don’t work, and most devastatingly, the mod lacks the ability to save. However, as it has been less than 24 hours since the game’s launch, what has been achieved so far is incredibly impressive.
Watching their gameplay footage it seems to play very smoothly when it’s not crashing. In the three-minute video we see our silent protagonist, Gordon Freeman, running around shooting down head crabs and driving in his buggy just like we remember. While the modder admits to having edited out the loading screens, it seems to play at a very stable frame rate.
It should be noted that this is definitely not intended by neither Valve nor Nintendo. In order to play something like this you require a modded Switch. Messing with the software on your console invalidates your warranty, and Nintendo won’t help you if it breaks.
It’s unclear whether Oatmeal will continue on with their project or if it was just a proof of concept. However, it shows that if Valve were to sell a Half-Life collection for Switch, it would be surprisingly easy given that the Portal architecture is already complete. Promising news for fans of alien shooters.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
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