I once crossed a river on horseback and thought for certain I would die. It rained the day before and the runoff made the water deeper and faster than usual—some grade-A drowning material. But Monty carried me. He waded up to his neck and carried me through the brute force of thousands of pounds of hurtling water like it was nothing more than a mud puddle. When we reached the other side, he turned back towards me, snorted, and took a dump.

At that moment, I knew I would become a videogames writer.

And no one understands the value of a loyal, healthy horse companion better than PC Gamer. They’ve helped us scale vertical cliffsides in Skyrim, disable tanks with their poops in Metal Gear Solid 5, and be less angry than normal when we couldn’t fast travel The Witcher 3. They’re also very pretty and I like the noises they make. 

But the time for sharing the love is over, as we've decided to declare the best horse in PC gaming through rigorous horse analysis. Tuck that shirt in, champ your bit, and let’s ride.

Round 1: Gait

The Appaloosa Horse Club—who sell some great Appaloosa-themed Idaho license plates, by the way—are my go-to for equine facts and criteria for showmanship and competition. To have a baseline acceptable gait, and I’m judging by Western style riding standards, a horse must “move straight and true at the walk.” Some horses, in games and real life, skitter at the sight of a small rock or pull over to snack on tall grass whenever they like. They’ll zigzag on easy terrain and take alternate paths on a whim. The perfect videogame horse knows where you want to go before you do. It can’t turn on a dime, but eases into your key presses without hesitation, and won’t tear off into the woods without checking with you first. Riding a horse is an exercise in trust, and if your horse is coded to be an erratic jerk, there’s nothing true left to walk for.

Roach: If Roach’s gait were true, I’d trust her, but damn, if I give Roach the smallest bit of leeway, she’s happy to take me on a trip down whatever fork in the path she feels like while clipping every fruit stand and fencepost on the way. 

Battlefield 1 horse: With reliable, steady gaits and just enough resistance on the reins to make them feel alive, the Battlefield 1 horses are great companions to ride. But in the trenches their surety and truth dissolves into nothing. Once they’re stuck in a trench, their otherwise reliable trots trot off while I jam the keys and fruitlessly try to lead them by the reins with my gun hands. War truly is hell.

D-Horse: It’s hard to properly assess D-Horse since most of Metal Gear Solid 5’s terrain is fairly flat, but even at top speeds, D-Horse keeps a steady back. When it comes to obstacles, though, D-Horse is a fickle creature, uncertain where to go or what to do with the slightest bump in the path. There’s a reason you can send D-Horse into the sky with a fulton parachute on demand. 

(Winner) Skyrim horse: Skyrim horse does not falter. They’ll try to climb cliff faces, invisible walls, visible walls, and even fly with the right console commands. (Every good horse knows a few console commands, eg AddShout Giddiyap, ModApple +1000, AntialiasMane_ON.) Problem is, they move like personal gravity isn’t a thing, trotting in a floaty way that highlights how their pace doesn’t match the length of their gait. But an odd, unrealistic gait doesn’t matter so long as it’s true and straight, which makes a loose adherence to gravity a pretty handy tool against mountainsides in your way.

Round 2: Mane attraction

Let’s talk about hair. There are a few traditional ways to groom and prepare a horse’s mane, and while they all serve a specific purpose, there is one objectively best way to do it: braiding. It utilizes the horse’s natural mane to make an impossible maze of mesmerizing, twisted strands while also keeping the hair out of way of riding implements and impacting the horse’s performance. Other methods include pulling or thinning, in which the mane is trim that still has weight and substance, but barely fills out half the nape, which is a horse crime. Banding uses rubber bands to make your horse look like a big joke, one tiny clump at a time. In a videogame, a mane shouldn’t make you laugh, it should make you feel unworthy and grateful because it doesn’t matter if you have level 99 dragonbone armor—you only look as good as your horse does.

Roach: In the complex horse lexicon, roach actually means to shave a poor creature’s mane down to its neck. But in The Witcher 3, Roach actually has a fairly lengthy mane. Geralt is definitely going for irony, but to use an otherwise healthy horse’s mane and its identity as the butt of a joke shows the two have some work to do before they can even take mane fashion seriously, let alone riding.

Battlefield 1 horse: A thinned mane isn’t a great starting point for this war boy, but with some subtle hair physics and a few longer loose strands, it looks like the Battlefield 1 horse has had a few weeks to let things grow a bit wilder than normal. If only a little wild was enough.

D-Horse: With a pulled and thinned mane, D-Horse won’t stop any single horses in their tracks, but his hair is functional and sleek despite its simple, compromised design. That said, after completing the game you get can equip the optional Furicorn skin, which gives D-Horse a demonic obsidian mohawk. It’s not exactly elegant and there’s no subsection in the Appaloosa Horse Club Handbook stating criteria for ideal rock spine arrangement, but it’s 100-percent better than roaching the sucker.

(Winner) Skyrim horse: Mods don’t disqualify horses from presentation categories since combing through arcane folders and unzipping files requires the exact same skillset as running a comb through a horse's mane. And with a few mods, you can give your Skyrim horse the braided mane they deserve. I can’t find a mod that does that, which falls to the community, but I understand the difficulty of making something so impossibly perfect. The potential for one to exist is enough for Skyrim horse to take the cake here. The Immersive Horses mod is a good starting point, bringing new breeds, commands, and some gorgeous natural manes to the table.

Round 3: Life Force

You won’t find this section in the Appaloosa Horse Club Handbook, but I have no doubt it’s a regular topic of debate among the board at every monthly potluck (Deborah makes some mean scalloped potatoes). When a good horse trots into a room, people turn their heads and recognize that yes, this is a horse, four legs, hooves—the whole rigamarole. A great horse trots into a room, though, and people know it without looking. They feel it. Also, they smell pretty bad, so that helps. But the ideal horse should carry an unseen energy, an inner glow that says, I’m a horse, my legs are big, and rivers are very easy to cross. Sidenote: can I have an apple? In videogames, this comes across best when a horse behaves like it isn’t a wire mesh and a few shades of brown.

Roach: There’s life force in Roach, but not in the ways that align with horse excellence. Were Roach to attempt what insiders call the ‘Triangle of Truth’ by walking the perimeter of a triangle in alternating walks and trots, he’d no doubt veer off path and into a pile of monsters, then get spooked and rear back, knocking Geralt to the ground. It’s a good demonstration of personality and life, but not in the ways that make a virtual horse an excellent riding and emotional companion. 

Battlefield 1 horse: The Battlefield horse has some pretty good idle animations. It whinnies, shakes out its mane, and flicks its tail. But you could drop a nuclear bomb half a mile away and they wouldn’t flinch. During a terrible twist in which I turned on my own horse, convinced they were a robot or phantasm assuming the visage of a horse, I held a flamethrower to their face and emptied the fuselage. What I found inside was unspeakable.

Skyrim horse: There’s no need to peer inside the Skyrim horse’s head to know it’s an empty vessel. While it’s the most mobile and powerful of every videogame horse, it sacrificed soul for functionality and took on the traits of a big hunk of styrofoam in the process. 

(Winner) D-Horse: I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday (not apples or barley, so what could it be?), but I can recall something someone said in a film theory class I took nearly a decade ago. Showing someone on the toilet in a movie is one of the most effective tools in establishing the diegesis, or universe, of the film. Doing so implies that this person ate off camera, went through the digestive process, and had to perform a mundane, regular, and highly relatable ritual. Similarly, by showing us D-Horse defecating and letting us use that to spin out jeeps so we can parachute them into the sky is key in establishing the sense that Metal Gear Solid 5’s world is a real place, as ridiculous as it is. Thanks to a stinky keystone I can envision D-Horse as a creature with its own desires and daily minutiae, and a livelier companion to spend time with beyond simple transportation and daily horse proximity needs.

Final Round: Graphics

For the final round, we’ll be reviewing what makes every videogame horse really stand out: the graphics. Graphics, as the Appaloosa Horse Club defines them, are “the polygons defining the wire mesh of a horse, the textures defining the color and features of the horse, and how those elements are in conversation with one another.” A few pages later, they summarize, stating each horse, “...should look pretty rad at 140Hz.” We couldn’t agree more, but it’s also one of the more difficult categories to rate, since every horse is beautiful, unique, shining, and eternal, and as such should be graded according to its own scale and not in any competition at all, actually. Oops.

Roach: Very Polish-ed. Huge, detailed muscles, but has a head that clips through physical objects, including its own body. Not a great look for a horse.

D-Horse: A very regular model with light contouring to give the impression that this horse could be lifted into the sky via parachute with ease. Good butt.

Skyrim horse: With a few mods they can look real enough to reach out and touch, or like a sabertooth tiger wearing cyber armor, a very rare horse indeed.

Battlefield 1 horse: Looks like a very realistic horse from the outside. Cosmic horror on the inside.

Winner: All horses

PC Gamer's pick for Best Horse goes to...

Skyrim’s horses take the cake, despite having dated animations and eyes deader than a mudcrab. They win because they’re the most expressive and diverse of the bunch thanks to mods. Granted, it’s never about what you want, but what you can do for them.

If a horse wants to be a flaming hell skeleton, it can. If it wants better animations, it can have them. If it wants a lush river of a mane, no problem. What color? We have them all. Skyrim’s horses can grow to the size of a mountain and snort to slay dragons. They can be smaller than an apple, which is sort of every horse’s dream, really. They can become deities of Skyrim, perfect in every way (except for the smell, that’s always going to be part of the deal). 

The only thing modding can’t do for a horse is program it to respect you, but a real horse’s mind is just as insurmountable, deserving of dedication and patience and no other expectation than for the privilege to simply get to and fro. Also, the Battlefield 1 horse was pretty cool, but I just couldn’t get over how creepy their eyeballs look from the inside.

I played Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain for about 30 hours in order to write my review. Over a year later, I've managed to put in another 60 hours on top of that, some of which had a purpose, but a lot of which could also be categorised as dicking around. Long after I'd cleared the final mission, 'The Truth', which I think everyone hated except me, I found myself going back to the occupied sprawls of Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border to perform hit-and-runs alongside my fictional dog, or to clear out outposts in record time by arcing grenades from atop hills and cliffs. Before I knew it, I'd played MGS 5 even more than GTA 5, and had long forgotten what Snake was even doing in Afghanistan. Something about deleting language and skeleton men? I dunno. Someone wore a bikini, it made no sense.

MGS 5 has a near endless nature to it that I love. While playing through the story lets players get to grips with the majority of basic weapons and upgrades available to Snake, the coolest toys are deliberately put out of reach within the game's vast upgrade trees, or gated behind objectives in specific side ops. This progression system gradually empowers the player like a great RPG does, expanding from a limited suite of useful weapons to a vast armoury of explosives, firearms and novelty costumes for Snake and his allies.

As a result, it's simply not the same game after 90 hours as it is after five or ten. Your understanding of how MGS 5's stealth and combat systems grows as your arsenal does. For the Ground Zeroes prologue and the first few missions of The Phantom Pain, I remember everything feeling a little overwhelming as I learned how navigating the world worked, and how the AI behaved. The game slowly builds up your confidence by letting you experiment with more and more toys to find your ideal loadout.

By my 90th hour with the game, I carry a robot hand the Hand of Jehuty, from Hideo Kojima's own cult mech PS2 series, Zone of the Enders that can drag a pursuing soldier from 20 feet away to Snake in a daze, so I can immediately knock them out. I own a Parasite Suit, which emulates the supernatural abilities of the game's irritating skull soldiers. My fulton recovery system, which once yanked soldiers into the sky for extraction, now opens a portal through time and space to deliver a goat back to my base. At this point, my Snake is basically a superhero. Not just because of these novel upgrades, but because the game essentially requires you to teach yourself how to use them effectively.

The journey to unlocking all of this has been a slow burn, but also exciting. With no narrative thread to follow anymore, every side op is an opportunity for experimentation. I play The Phantom Pain like I play GTA that attitude of, let's take all of these toys out for a spin and see what sort of trouble I can cause. You couldn't really play the previous Metal Gears in the same way, since the levels were narrow and linear by design. Few sandbox games are constructed to be played from as many angles as this, and I'd personally argue that none are as precise to control or as customisable.

Metal Gear Solid 5 is designed to be living and endless. It's a truly generous single-player game that still challenges you to experiment with your strategies, and I think its best moments come well after the credits.

When most games end, they attempt to wrap up the plot with a neat bow, completing character arcs and leaving plot threads tangled ever so lightly, just to leave enough ambiguity open for a potential sequel. It s nice! I like it when games feel self-contained, when I can go to bed at night with the entirety of the experience neatly laid out in my mind s eye like an intricate quilt of motivations and rising and falling action. I don t have to think anymore, it s over with, resolved. But the games that push back against resolution and bury themselves in my subconscious are the ones that stick, for better or worse. Some defy the expected structure of the game and cut things off before they get started, others spin out into surreal nightmare experiments that would keep David Lynch up at night. Because we re directly involved with pushing the game towards a conclusion, it s when they attempt to subvert and rattle my senses rather than ride along with them that I feel most vulnerable and why I ll always fear Regis Philbin. Find out why in our list of some of the most abrupt, bizarre game endings out there. Spoiler warning: it should be obvious, but we re going to talk about some of the most surprising moments in these games, and some are fairly recent, so proceed with caution.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain 

I remember being pretty dissatisfied with the ending of Metal Gear Solid 5, but in the rearview, I think it s only because it comes after a slow, repetitive second act when compared to the first. But the big twist is actually pretty cool. In the end, it s revealed that the player character was in fact not Big Boss, but the Phantom , an MSF medic that the original Big Boss used as a front to work behind the scenes. After the helicopter crash in Ground Zeroes, Big Boss took the opportunity to use hypnotherapy and plastic surgery to make you a spitting image of him. As a metaphor, it s a sweet gesture, one that indicates MGS players were an important force in the long term success of the series, and for lore aficionados, it plugs in a few plot holes in its half-century span.

The Stanley Parable - the art ending 

In a grand test of patience (and the essential act of playing a videogame), The Stanley Parable s strangest ending involves pressing a big red button to prevent a cardboard baby from entering a fire. A few hours in and another button is thrown into the mix, this time preventing a cardboard puppy from drowning. Juggling those two buttons for a few more hours will reveal the true meaning of art to the player if they re patient enough. It s an interesting test in player motivation, and unsurprisingly, it didn t take long for someone to get through it. Anything for art.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire - Regis flips

Who knew trauma could come in a cereal box? Regis Philbin, host of the once popular game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire provided his voice and likeness for a free CD version of the game that came with General Mills cereal for a limited time back at the turn of the millennium. But CD Regis has no chill. It s not just during the player select screen that he runs out of patience with lightning ferocity, Regis loses his shit if you take long doing nearly anything at all. If you don t type your name, he ll type Kathie Lee and the questions will be easier, and if you don t answer during the Fastest Finger contest, Regis gets angry and turns the game off. If I spent my formative years living in a dark cell full of Honey Nut Cheerios, I m not sure I d have the greatest disposition either, I suppose. Just leave Kathie out of this.

Far Cry 4 - finished in 15 minutes

During the earliest moments of Far Cry 4 you meet Pagan Min, the murky, unhinged antagonist. After a tense scene at the dinner table, he ll leave to attend to an urgent matter. Most players typically bail at this point I mean, Pagin licks your mother s ashes off his finger. I d bail too. But if you wait it out 15 minutes or so, he ll return and take you to your mother s grave, which is where you wanted to go in the first place. So you spread her ashes, feel feelings, and then Min asks if you re ready to shoot some goddamn guns. Credits roll and the game ends at which point most folks take Min s advice and start over. I do wonder about the one person that found that ending and returned the game, or possibly felt like it worked and never touched Far Cry 4 again. If you exist, email me.

Silent Hill 2 - Dogs rule the world

There isn t much to say about the secret dog ending in Silent Hill 2. It s baffling. By finding the Dog Key and entering the observation room of the Lakeview Hotel, James opens the door to find Mira, a shiba inu, operating a series of buttons and levers. He breaks down, in disbelief that a dog was behind the series of nightmarish events that led him to this point. It s popularly considered a joke ending, but I ll die on the canon hill. I mean, the credits are a dopey montage of clips featuring characters from the game set to a song sung by the powerful pooch in a series of barks and yips. It s adorable, and given the context, absolutely horrifying.

Dishonored - a foiled plot 

OK, so this one isn t a fair entry since it requires taking advantage of some game-breaking glitches, but it s too funny to leave out. At the beginning of Dishonored, Corvo is framed for the assassination of the empress and kidnapping her daughter. The event sets up the rest of the game, a dozen or so hours of infiltration missions set across Dunwall. At Summer Games Done Quick, speedrunner DrTChops showed us how he could prevent the assassination and kidnapping from happening at all, as broken as his method might be. Watch the video to see him work his way toward the assassins before they initiate their attack and kill them, at which point the screen kicks to black. It s a silly Groundhog s Day solution to a problem that doesn't really need solving, and a funny demonstration of games can be entertaining long after their intent has been exhausted.

Start the video at 16:42:00 to see for yourself.

Furi - life in paradise 

Before attacking The Stranger, the sixth boss The Song gives him a chance to hang out with her on her floating island Oasis for eternity. If you walk on by, she ll get angry and attack you, but if you hang out in on the island for a while, she ll thank you, talk about your lovely future together, and the credits will roll. For a game all about intense, intimate combat, I was pleasantly surprised to find an option hidden in the halfway point that rewards the exact opposite.

Portal 2 - Space! 

Portal 2 s closing moments acknowledge that there s no such thing as a perfect ending. There will always be loose threads, plot holes, and burning questions, so Valve opted instead for a soothing salve: the musical number. After defeating Wheatley by shooting a portal on the moon and banishing him to space as if this ending wasn t rad enough GLaDOS returns to her big robot body and instead of killing you, asks to be left alone. Freedom is imminent, but on the elevator ride up turrets big and small and leopard-printed sing a final farewell song before you re coughed up into a field of golden wheat with a scorched companion cube for company. Hooray? Hooray.

Inside - the blob

I think about Inside on a weekly basis now how it uses a slight, subdued color palette and precise animations to communicate more powerful bits of body horror than the best in the biz. Whether it s the shake of a dog s head as it rips at the leg of a small boy or the light crunch and irregular fold after miscalculating a dangerous leap, Inside knows how to do discomfort. And no moment demonstrates it better than the final 15 to 20 minutes of the game, where the player character is subsumed into an amorphous blob of writhing, moaning limbs. You help the blob escape the facility, bursting through panes of bulletproof glass, over an unlucky person or two, and eventually through the outermost wall of the facility, limbs scraping and clawing and twisting all the while.

To see such a confusion of familiar human pieces and pained voices come together as something inhuman, and then to help the horrifying inhuman thing achieve a goal is one of the more trying exercises in empathy I ve experienced in a game. And it worked. After escaping and rolling down a forested hill, the blob comes to rest on the beach. The voices go silent and the limbs go limp. A ray of light splits through the clouds, the waves gently lap at the shore. I felt relief for the creature, glad it finally had a chance to rest. The credits roll and it s over. Why do I feel good?

Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy - uhhh 

I played this game from tip to toe in one or two sittings when it came out and I still can't parse what's going on here. It s hard to believe that the amazing opening diner sequence wasn t even close to an indication of what was coming. In the span of a few hours, Indigo Prophecy went from covering up a unintentional murder with police on the way in a timed, consequential adventure game format, to whatever this is. There s flying dudes with some cyber powers I think. They fight in the air and shoot colored lines at one another. Something about figuring out what to do with his new cyber powers, a big storybook tree, and the credits roll. Someone please translate.

The Witness - Urine Jug: Origins

I have to hand it to The Witness. For a game all about drawing lines, it really carries the theme through in the true ending. After riding the Wonka elevator into the sky and getting the credits, if you continue in a new game, a certain sky-themed puzzle might pop out at you from the very first room you start in. Theoretically, you can finish The Witness in the first minute of playing it. After you figure it out, a door opens and you get a behind the scenes, upscale-hotel-looking tour of a previously invisible building. There are some audio logs lying around that speak the credits aloud, and at the end, well.You pass through the darkness and into the real world via a short video shot by a camera attached to Jonathan Blow s head. He meanders around the development studio, noticing patterns from The Witness all around him before looking up into the sky as the shot fades to white.

Although packing a pretty impressive 50 missions, the ending of Metal Gear Solid 5 remains a point of contention for many of its players. In November, Samuel wrote about why the award-winning stealth em up s conclusion is one perfect moment in an otherwise bad story (warning: obvious spoilers within), however many players consider it to be incomplete particularly against the fact the game s Collector's Edition owners were treated to seemingly work-in-progress storyboards for the now cancelled mission 51.

While promoting the forthcoming Metal Gear Solid 5: Definitive Experience, the official Metal Gear Solid 5 twitter feed was challenged by many users with regards to the perceived unfinished game, to which it firmly shut the down the possibility of a 51st mission ever seeing the light of day.

When asked by one user how long players need to continue asking for a more conclusive ending, the official MGS account responded with this:

@NTPrime I'm afraid we have no current plans to further develop for Mission 51.August 30, 2016

When asked the more direct question: How is [the incoming Ground Zeroes/Phantom Pain collection] definitive if the ending is still missing? , the official account replied:

@Spindash54 @Konami Mission 51 is additional story content that was cancelled before development finished, but its definitely not the endingAugust 30, 2016

The thread in its entirety can be viewed here, however does include significant story spoilers. Nevertheless, this is the first time Konami has officially put the idea of 'finishing' Metal Gear Solid 5's story, as it were, to bed.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Definitive Experience is due October 13. The first Metal Gear game minus series creator Hideo Kojima Metal Gear Survive is due at some point next year.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain was our game of the year in 2015, however the foundations for it were laid by standalone introductory chapter Ground Zeroes. Today, Konami has announced Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience which gathers both games and a bunch of DLC under one banner.

Due to launch via Steam on October 13, players can expect additional Mother Base currency , as well as a slew of items, including Rasp Short-Barrelled Shotguns, the Adam-ska Special handgun, a range of Personal Ballistic Shields, and a number of costumes for The Phantom Pain. Previously console-exclusive Ground Zeroes missions D j Vu and Jamais Vu are also included, as are a number of DLC packs and weapons for Metal Gear Online.

Metal Gear Solid V has received collectively over 60 industry accolades and awards thus far, says Konami president Tomotada Tashiro in a statement. The Definitive Experience will give players an opportunity to play the complete MGSV experience, without interruption. Additionally, with Metal Gear Online, players also get access to a completely unique multi-player setting that is designed for a truly engrossing gaming experience as well.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience is due October 13. Console versions will cost 34.99/$39.99, however Steam pricing is yet to be confirmed. Read Sam s review of The Phantom Pain over here.

We first learned about the Phantom Limb Project, an effort to create a Metal Gear Solid V-inspired artificial limb for a young lad named James, back in November of 2015. At the time, there were no images of the planned prosthetic, but the announcement said the work would be filmed and eventually released as a three-part documentary. And so it has mostly.

Mostly, because it's actually only two parts, totaling a little over a half-hour. But it's a fascinating thing to watch, despite the limb and spoilers here, sorry about that not turning out to be the silver bullet some might have hoped for. With its modular design and glowing components, it looks like something straight out of Deus Ex, but it functions quite a bit below that baseline. James handles it all with grace, even posing for photos for the media assembled to witness the unveiling, but there's obvious tension in the room when he first puts the arm on and it's clearly a disappointment.

The arm, it's not really... It's been forced into the public eye and it's not even ready yet, James says. I mean, it needs to take its first steps, but it can't walk. It can't even crawl.

Despite the setback, the outcome isn't gloomy. Contacts with other amputees are made, friendships established, work on the arm continues and James demonstrates a remarkable aptitude for interacting and sharing his experiences with the public. More information about his Konami-inspired prosthetic arm is available at thephantomlimbproject.com.

Metal Gear Solid Online is getting a new patch next week, and it'll introduce a game mode you might recognise from previous iterations of Metal Gear (assuming you owned a console, back then). Dubbed 'Survival Mode', it doesn't involve chopping down trees, picking berries or anything like that: it's a six player free-for-all with the objective of getting a win-streak of five or more matches.

Unless you own the Cloaked in Silence expansion, you'll only get to play Survival mode ten times a week. For owners of that DLC pack access is unlimited. While those who haven't forked out for that DLC will be able to "try out" the new maps in it, it's clear that Konami wants you to buy the bloody DLC, okay?

The update is expected to hit on April 5. If you fancy having a read of some CQC stat mumbo-jumbo, click through to the official MGS website. 

The man who was Metal Gear Solid s Snake for 10 years, David Hayter, hasn t played either of the most recent games in the series after he was dropped from the title role.

Hayter hasn t played MGS5 or precursor Ground Zeroes, and he explained his reasoning thusly on the Game Informer podcast:

I was so annoyed by the Metal Gear 5 debacle, and people said, 'are you gonna play the game?' Yeah. That'll be 60 hours of humiliation that I can't get to. I haven't played the latest two iterations because it's just too painful.

Hayter said he found out he wouldn t be employed for The Phantom Pain after asking about it during a chance meeting with casting and voice director of the game, Kris Zimmerman. Hayter explained: She said, 'We're going forward, but it looks like they are going to try and replace you'. They tried to do that before, and it never worked.

Said attempts at replacement happened in Metal Gear Solid 3, where Kojima offered the role of Snake to Kurt Russell, who declined. Kojima also required Hayter to re-audition for the role of Old Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4. Seems his role has never been nailed down.

I've got no particular love for Kojima, Hayter threw out there, I don't feel any need to go back and work with him again.

In total this is my opinion as an aside fashion, I don t find it too surprising Hayter was meant to be replaced before. Synonymous with Snake he might be, and a part of our shared gaming history he definitely is... but a good voice actor? Hammy, over-the-top, unintentionally hilarious? Sure.

But good? I m not so sure. Still would have been better than Kiefer s half-role in MGS5, mind.