Apparently, House of the Dead 4 was released into arcades and nobody told me...

Anyways, two arcades near me, a Sega Gameworks and a Dave and Busters, both have two HOTD4 machines, so being the light gun junkie I am, I dumped at least $40 into this game. I got all the way to the final boss before calling it quits. My impressions are as follows:
HOTD 4, like the other games in the series, is kinda like the light gun equivilant of Smash TV: It's hard as hell, it will kick your ass over and over again, and you'll end up loving it at the end. The Smash TV comparision is really apt in 4, where the game will throw a dozen zombies at you early and often. Which brings me to my next point...
The machine gun and grenades mechanics are really satisfying. There's nothing more stress relieving then having 20 mutant zombies bum rushing you, then you use a grenade to clear the room and go Scarface on the ones that are left. Great, if a little gory, fun.
All the zombies from previous games are back: the skeletons, the mossy ones, the fat ones, the hatchet-weilding ones, the ones that walk on walls... they're all here.
The bosses are kinda easy once you get the rythim (sp?) down. You do get weakpoint markers for all but the final boss, and in HOTD tradition, the final boss' weakpoint is unspecified, yet pretty obvious (a gaping red thing in it's chest, naturally).
Shaking the gun at specific points seems a little throwaway to me. All of the segments using that mechanic are pretty easy if you shake the gun really hard.
Overall, if you have an extra $16,000 lying around, this is a good addition to your gaming room.
