Metal Slug 5's Notorious Slide Move — and the Fan Patch That Finally Killed It
Metal Slug 5 has a reputation problem, and it isn't the final boss. When the fifth game hit the Neo Geo MVS in 2003, SNK Playmore's Noise Factory added one mechanic the series had never had before: a slide. Twenty-plus years later, a fan on r/neogeo has finally carved it out of the ROM — and the patch is already up on romhacking.net.
We told the series' full 30-year story in a separate deep dive. This is the shorter tale of the one move players couldn't stand, and the hobbyist who spent weeks deleting it.
What was Metal Slug 5's slide?
Metal Slug 5 was developed by Noise Factory and published by SNK Playmore in 2003, near the very end of the Neo Geo MVS's life. For four games straight, the controls barely moved: A to shoot, B to jump, C to toss a grenade. Pressing down and jump together just made your soldier hop while staying low.
Metal Slug 5 repurposed that exact input. Hold down and press B (jump), and instead of hopping, your character lunged forward in a low slide. On paper it was a dodge — a way to slip under incoming fire. In practice, it collided with roughly a decade of muscle memory.
Why did players hate it?
The trigger was the problem. The slide sat on the same "down + jump" input that four earlier games had used for a plain jump. In a series where one wrong press means death, an accidental slide was a fast way to eat a bullet you were trying to hop over.
The r/neogeo thread reads like a support group. "I sold my Metal Slug 5 MVS Kit mainly because I didn't like the slide mechanics," wrote u/pagauge0 — an actual Neo Geo collector who let an arcade board go over a single control choice. Another player was blunter: the move was only kind of useful on one boss halfway through, and a liability everywhere else.
The patch's author, u/RS_Skywalker, remembers it from the arcade floor: "When a quarter was like gold to me, it made me sooo mad when it unintentionally got me killed."
Some of the resentment is about Metal Slug 5 in general. The game ran short, and next to Metal Slug 3's sheer density it felt rushed. A move that mostly got you killed was just one more rough edge.
The patch that killed the slide
RS_Skywalker started with a public SOS post asking for help patching Metal Slug 5. It turned out to be far bigger than it looked. By their count, the slide gets triggered through about 20 different code paths — a crouch-jump while shooting and turning, a crouch-jump while standing perfectly still, and on. Each one had to be found and neutralized.
The Neo Geo's cartridge encryption was the harder fight. Rather than wrestle it across every ROM variant in the wild, they patched the two most common ways people play the game today: the semi-decrypted "mslug5b" bootleg set that MAME uses, and the "Metal Slug 5 (mslug5).neo" file most MiSTer owners run.
There was even talk of remapping the slide to the Neo Geo's D button rather than deleting it — but that would have meant rewriting hard-coded instruction addresses, so deletion won out.
The result is surgical. Down + B makes your soldier jump again, matching Metal Slug 1 through 4. It's free on romhacking.net (hack #9331), and the author says similar tweaks may follow.
Where to play Metal Slug today
The arcade original — and this patch — runs on real Neo Geo hardware or emulators, not a web browser. But if you've fallen down a Metal Slug rabbit hole, the GBA and DS entries are playable right here.
Metal Slug Advance carried the run-and-gun to Game Boy Advance with its own card-collecting twist, and Metal Slug 7 kept the series alive after the Neo Geo era ended. Both run in your browser on OldGame.io — no downloads, no emulator setup. Play Classic Games. No Downloads. Just Play.
