Assuming that the game is coming out this year, Round1 locations in the USA will almost certainly get it shortly afterward, so I'm excited. If it officially releases in North America--and I don't see why it wouldn't, as every previous game has officially released in North America--then Dave & Buster's is pretty much guaranteed to be in.
The closed booth cabinet sounds almost exactly like that of Dark Escape 4D, right down to the vibrating seat and bursts of air. That is in no way a bad thing.
Wow, it feels like it's been so long since the last one
Well, HotD 4 came out in 2006. That was over 11 years ago, so it actually has been a long time since the last one.
Thankfully HotD has a good track record of coming to consoles.
Well...it has a good track of record of coming to consoles
when rail shooters are actually in production. For the first few years of the 360/PS3 there was nothing. Wii got a few, but there's no way HotD 4 would ever run on a Wii. It wasn't until PSMove that we finally got a few on PS3, and THAT is when we finally got a home port of 4...in 2012, six years later.
I don't think you're going to see console ports of this or Time Crisis 5 anytime soon because, once again, this genre of game just isn't currently in production for home consoles. There is no gun or motion controller for Xbox One, and even if Kinect was still supported, it's not fast enough for this purpose. Even if Switch is powerful enough to run the current arcade games (which it may or may not be), it lacks a proper motion control solution, and the touchscreen isn't big enough to be satisfying with two players. The demand is not there for new PSMove games outside of PSVR. And no current VR platforms allow for the use of two headsets at once, so how would you even support two players?
On this topic, no light guns only work on CRT AFAIK.
How do the new Namco ones like that pictured Time Crisis work?
I believe most of them use some sort of infrared/camera tracking. The mounted gun games don't really count because the gun is basically like a big analog stick.
Namco already developed an infrared gun for home use, the GunCon3. But AFAIK, only the crappy port of Time Crisis 4 (sold with the GC3) and the Razing Storm collection (which also included Deadstorm Pirates) actually supported it.
I'm not sure what exactly they're for; they get tallied up and are part of your rank evaluation at the end of the stage, but then your count gets reset between stages. It's possible they might be used to unlock things in the final version of the game, yeah, but no idea for now.
Almost ALL Japanese arcade games released in the last few years seem to be Internet-connected, use an IC card for login, and store your progress server-side, so this sounds like a strong possibility. Of course, this will likely be disabled in the North American release because most American arcades don't seem to care =\
