Switch modders mostly run Half-Life 2 through the portal

So, Portal: The Companion Collectiona bundle of Valve’s 3D puzzle platformers portal and portal 2, just released on the Nintendo Switch. But not long after its surprise release during this week’s Direct Mini Partner Showcasea modder called OatmealDome has already found a way to get the famous FPS half-life 2 Runs on the Switch and it kinda works.

OatmealDome is relatively well known in the Nintendo datamining and modding community. They provided insights into the nature of Nintendo’s GBA emulator for Switch and uncovered corrections to NSOs The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. That means they were around the block.

Her latest achievement was loaded half-life 2 into the Switch version of portal. There were a few issues with the mod: it crashed occasionally, while OatmealDome also said some maps were “impossible to advance in them”, saves didn’t work, NPC animations were broken, and world cameras spawned incorrectly. Despite this, the results looked quite satisfactory.

And I really mean that: OatmealDome is charging portaljust so it actually boots as half-life 2! What the what? Anyway, in their video, they briefly scroll through some menus and look at various settings and key commands before starting a new game in Chapter 7 titled “Highway 17”. In this part of the game, the protagonist Gordon Freeman whips him through a freeway in a buggy to save Eli Vance from the villains in Nova Prospekt, smacking his ass with a crowbar in the process.

There is occasional stuttering in OatmealDome’s clip, but mostly half-life 2 seems to run smoothly. The audio of the shots is synchronized with the weapons. Camera tracking moves fairly smoothly. And graphically it looks serviceable enough to be a mere Switch mod of another game.

“The main reason this works so well is because of that gate 1 is basically just a glorified mod for half-life 2“, Oatmeal Dome tweeted. “Like the player code for portal based directly on the player code for half-life 2. Nvidia Lightspeed Studios leaves behind a number of half-life 2 Wealth helps too.”

When reached via Twitter DMs for comment, OatmealDome shared my box a bit more about how they managed to get half-life 2

runs on the switch. The Nintendo modder explained that the leftover assets are a definite plus, and while most of the work involved “just copying what wasn’t there (maps, music) into the game,” they also “needed a code -Write a patch to fix a crash” they still couldn’t get to the root cause. It wasn’t too complicated a task for her, it was just a matter of putting in the time.

“It was more time consuming than anything considering I was working on a laptop with a really slow hard drive,” OatmealDome said. “A lot of the work has already been done for me by Valve and NVIDIA – the source engine is easy to modify, gate 1 is just a mod by half-life 2many half-life 2The files from already existed, etc.”

OatmealDome described the mod’s performance as “borderline acceptable”. It runs at 60 frames per second, but with a lot of stuttering, they suspect it’s “mostly due to shader generation and compilation.” Load times are also obnoxiously long, according to OatmealDome’s tests.

But as “big half-life “Fan” since they were kids, OatmealDome said they’d be buying a collection of Valve’s groundbreaking FPS on the Switch “in no time” if Nintendo ever made it. And they think it’s entirely possible.

“Even potato PCs can run these games just fine right now, so I’m pretty sure the Switch shouldn’t have any issues in a proper port,” OatmealDome said. “I got it too Half Life 2: Episode 2 runs, but the game is extremely unstable and tends to crash. However, most maps will not load.”

It’s unclear what’s next for OatmealDome’s half-life 2 change mode. However, it’s cool to see the game making it to the handheld-console hybrid in an unofficial capacity. Perhaps it will inspire other unexpected projects.