Hoss Corncave posted:

The House of the Dead games actually do have a strange story to them. In House of the Dead, the story goes that Rogan and G (two government agents from the AMS) are sent to the Curien Mansion after a tip off from a researcher there called Sophie (Rogan's wife). When they get there, it turns out that Curien has gone mad and created a virus that will turn people into zombies and other things. They get through to him fending off multiple enemies and eventually meet Curien. He unveils his masterpiece, the Magician, who then turns on him and proclaims that he will destroy everything, until Rogan and G take him down.

In HotD2, two new AMS agents are sent in to meet with G a few years later and the virus has been released to certain places. G gets injured and James and Gary are sent out to stop a man named Goldman, who was funding the Curien incident. After fighting through more enemies (including a reborn Magician who doesn't rebel against his master), they meet Goldman at his tower building who claims that humans need to be destroyed because they're killing the planet(and is a contender for the greatest piece of voice acting ever). He unveils what he considers the creature to rule over the world and destroy all humans, the Emperor, which is defeated by James and Gary, and then Goldman decides to just fall backwards off the roof after saying something about how it isn't over.

Then we get some Zelda/MGS timeline choices. The next game chronologically is HotD4, which features James and a new female agent called Kate following up on the Goldman incident. It turns out that the viral outbreak has spread around the world, and Goldman is still alive and has a bigger plan involving Pandora's Box. They go around trying to prevent a plot to launch nuclear missiles around the world, and end up finding Pandora's Box, which unleashes Goldman's final creation, The World. James and Kate fight it, but it just keeps getting stronger, so James sacrifices himself to blow it up, killing both of them in the explosion. In the ending, it hints that there were more Pandora's Boxes out there and that it wasn't over.

Finally we have HotD3, which is set 16 years after HotD4, and the world is pretty much hosed. Rogan and another AMS agent go to a facility but are stopped and confronted by a mysterious figure. This prompts G and Lisa (Rogan's daughter) to go looking for them, and they eventually find them and the mysterious figure who is revealed to be Daniel, Curien's son. He was suffering from a seemingly terminal illness so his father before his death at the hands of the Magician had discovered a way to cure it. Daniel reveals that Curien had found the Wheel of Fate, which converted his body into a cyborg and sent him crazy... well, crazier. Usual things happen - Lisa and Daniel destroy the Wheel of Fate, we wait for HotD5.