House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn

This game, which sadly is only available in arcades, is actually one of the better entries into the long-running House of the Dead series. I've beaten it at least 3 times, at different arcades including one in Tokyo that was more of an immersive amusement-park ride experience (unless I hallucinated the whole thing) and had a great time with each playthrough. I still think 2 is the absolute pinnacle of this series though, and I don't think the shift to an automatic weapon that occurred with 4 was a change for the better. This one plays quite a bit like 4, where you just hold down the trigger and somewhat mindlessly spray bullets at a constant stream of zombified goons. The mobs are pretty insane here, and sometimes the game literally seems to be fallling apart rendering the absolute tidal wave of enemies on screen. I do really appreciate the increased variety of special weapons to play around with. The story is righteously absurd, full of inexplicably written dialog, baffling voice acting, and nonsense plotting that has some nice callbacks to previous entries in the series. You know, the good stuff. The graphics and presentation are also quite nice, but do try to find a machine with the sound turned up because in a loud arcade the voices tend to be inabible and there don't seem to be subtitles turned on by default. You won't want to miss out on these SHOCKING REVELATIONS, trust me.