From making you more attractive to the opposite sex, increasing powers of communication or making you feel all sophisticated by swirling a glass of brandy in your palm; alcohol, as Homer Simpson once said, truly is the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. So, to celebrate the wonder of liquid refreshment of an alcoholic nature, here's a list of gaming’s biggest drunks and the perils and pitfalls each have faced thanks to their passion for hops, spirits and wines.

Granin | Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

There are many good reasons to drink. To make yourself feel important. To come up with brilliant ideas that could only ever conceivably work while under the influence. To console the pain of having your really awesome Metal Gears scrapped for the Shagohod - aka the clunkiest, most useless nuclear tank ever built. Inconsolable hurt or not though, we think knocking back the Kremlin’s finest liver-hating fuel before sunrise is pushing it just a tad. But that’s exactly what Granin does for his entire pre-dawn slur fest with Snake.

Still, the Ruskie scientist keeps it together well enough to relay some pretty detailed directions to Snake, as well as imparting his opinions on all things capitalism. And, considering he was mere hours away from being beaten into a bloody pulp at the electrified fists of main baddie Volgin, having a few final belts to take the edge off all that pesky mutilation and murder was probably a good idea.

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Santa | Hitman: Blood Money

Ah, Blood Money’s soused Santa, we barely knew ye… probably because we either strangled, stabbed or suffocated you. Swaggering about like that embarrassing drunk uncle who always ruins family occasions, the Chris Cringle impostor cuts a drunken and soon to be doomed figure. This being the wonderfully lurid and perverted universe of Hitman, though, he’s still the most sensible character at a mansion-based, mountaintop Christmas soirée that includes a reclusive porn baron, a hooker-beating politician’s son and a female assassin with a fiendish festive surprise.



In a mansion with a cloned assassin who strangles people with cheese wire, being off your face – thus leaving your neck exposed for a nice slitting or syringing – might not seem like the best idea. Look at it pragmatically, though, and his alcohol addiction is easily as effective a form of defence against slaphead-sponsored death as using the world’s smallest and most easily poisoned mutt as a guard dog or sitting in a ludicrously breakable overhanging Jacuzzi. We’ll take booze-numbed death over spleen-shattering falls anytime, thank you.

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