Preliminary: This was my brother and my main go to at the arcade when we actually had some quarters. But my mom would never let us have more than a dollar or so, ha, so that meant most games were impossible to finish. We managed to finish this one, which is very rare, and indeed that was thanks to another kid letting us use his quarters ha.

Look: 8/10 Great colors, great set design, and one of my favorite era of graphics. Nothing like the RE type 3D sprites.

Sound: -/- I couldn't really hear it due to the other arcade machines so I can't rate this till I replay it someday.

Play: 8/10 Great addition of saving lives, even if we only saved a few ha. Good idea of bosses too, really added to the usual light gun formula. Felt repetitive near the end but so do most arcade games to me. Even if it felt repetitive, there are a bunch of little things I know I will do differently next time because I learned, like opening the gates to save some of the scientists. A lot of replayability in general to this game. I know my husband wasn't loving it as much as me, but I clicked well with with--probly from nostalgia and familiarity (plus he was probly disappointed Carnevil wasn't working).

Feel: 8/10 Great set design and sense of adventure. I like how it fully incorporates an adventure/survival horror feel a la Resident Evil (released the same year), eg with the security card and non linear level design (tho luckily not like RE where you can get lost easily etc--you still get to the boss either way in this one ha). Interesting to read there are multiple endings based on rank, we did darn good for our first time then! I like how the perspective feels like you're the character looking, reacting, and adventuring--rounding a corner, hanging from an edge, looking down then up, etc. And I love so much of the Look, such as the background when you meet the evil boss guy at the end of Chapter 3. Soooo Resident Evil looking and the graphics in general so PS1. I feel like mid to late 90s console games caught up to arcade games in terms of responsive controls and graphics, unlike the preceding eras (the PS1 and Dreamcast vs contemporary arcade games, as opposed to Speccy and Atari vs their contemporary arcade games ha)

Attachment: 9/10 Indeed, only one gun was working today, but we still had fun playing basically the single.player experience--just trading turns. Our plan was to play Carnevil (cuz my husband has nostalgia for that one too), but both guns weren't working for that machine. House of the Dead felt a little long but about the right time length for an arcade game. Not only have I returned to this game many times, but I know I will return to it again, so it deserves a good Attachment rating. I wanna play it solo and see if I can manage to save all the scientists and get the best rank (I even wanna play it solo also on MAME so I can hear it.) And I also wanna play it again with my brother since I know he'd remember it and now it's just nickels to play! We aren't limited to 1 dollar from Mom anymore haha.

It was a good time

Here's my 2 attempts at capturing the end sequence/credits tho I wish I had known there were 3 different endings so I paid closer attention to what happened to Sophie with our rank.

Completion: Main Story Playtime: ~40 mins