Valve’s classic PC game Portal is coming to the NVIDIA Shield through the Google Play Store next week, though sadly it won’t work on any other Android devices.
The first-person action-puzzle game, for lack of a better term, will land on the Play Store on May 12, and cost $9.99, the same price as the original PC version. The game will be essentially the same as the original version, except you’ll be able to play it on a handheld device running Android instead of on a PC.
Portal first came out in 2007 as part of The Orange Box, which also Included Half-Life 2 (along with its two episodes) and Team Fortress 2 (before it was free-to-play). Because it’s been out for so long, it’s likely that most people who want to play it have done so already. And it seems like a pretty safe bet that most NVIDIA Shield owners already played through the game multiple times. The exciting part here might not be the chance to play a classic game on a new console, however.
Perhaps more exciting than Portal coming to Shield is that it means Valve and NVIDIA have ported the Source Engine to Android. Source is the graphics engine that powers all of Valve’s games, including the aforementioned Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, as well as Left 4 Dead. If one game works on the platform, it stands to reason that it may possible to port other Source games to the Shield. It’s hard to imagine anything much more recent than Portal coming to the platform any time soon, but a chance to replay Half-Life 2 on the go sounds like a great idea.
What Source games would you like to see come to the Shield? Would more classic PC games entice you to buy the handheld?