It's great to see this series make a return to the arcades.
A while later, I was actually playing Soul Edge at the time, a friend of mine comes up to the old game section, and says "They have a new Time Crisis I think"... Ok, maybe they put Time Crisis Crisis Zone in arcades, is all I could think. I go to machine he was talking about, and it's friggin' Time Crisis 4. Words can't describe how excited I was. I'm a big fan of the series, and I didn't even know this was out.
Onto the game. The gamplay itself does have a few changes. There is much more variety, such as the "3 screen battle mode" In which it asks you to point the gun in a certain direction off the screen to turn in the corresponding direction, killing soldiers from all sides. This shows some technological advances since Time Crisis 3.
The biggest improvement since Time Crisis 3 is definetly the graphics. The lighting is beautiful, and environments look great. All the characters look pretty good, despite having a rather low poly count. But, as mentioned, the high detail environments make up for it. Looks great.
The sound is also really great to. Due to the fact tha this is an arcade game, they can mess around with the machine all they want, and in the case of sound, they have. Essentially, there is a giant speaker right in front of you while you play, and whenever someone talks to you over the radio in the game, it comes out of there, and sounds great. It really adds to the immersiveness of the whole experience. Plus, the speaker glows read with every word the person says over the radio, which really adds, again, to the immersiveness.
Unfortunately, I only made it through about 2 thirds of the game with my friend on link play before we both ran out of quarters. Needless to say, as soon as I have a bunch more money, I'm going back to that arcade and beating the game. If you can manage to find this beast of an arcade machine somewhere at an arcade near you, you won't be dissapointed. Try to play it.