Im guessing what the picture about this whole fiasco is that its generally more impressive to go through an arcade game without using continues since arcade games are known to be hard in general, especially on the hardest dificullty.
Console games are different in that regard because usually games have sort of a continue option built in for casuall gaming. Take Ganbare Goemon for example. It literally has infinite continues. That will mean that you will beat the game eventually. This might sound like it would take no skill to beat it, but the fact of the matter is that the designers didnt intend for plaers to use death to skip portions of the game. Therefore, the impressive play would come from the effective utilization of deaths & infinite continues.
In Arcades though, you have to pay to keep on playing games that you are most likely not going to beat in your 1st try. This is because arcade games in general were designed to basically suck your money away. But, since dying actually gives a stronger position or an instant kill attack in most games, it is usually considered cheap since you used the games automatic routine of getting you started right back into the game. So its usually more impressive to try and survive in one credit. The Metal Slug games for instance, are known to be crazy and severely challenging. So obviouly, It would look very impressive to survive the onslaught without losing a life. Im not trying to go against you x2poet, but im just trying to grasp what people mean by deaths in arcade runs "ruining the entertainment".
For Metal Slug's case though, its also considered very impressive to using limited resources effectively like the deaths in Ganbare Goemon. If you use a continue, you are basically using an unlimited resource of power which doesnt seem impressive at all since almost everybody could basically do it. But in my eyes, seeing where ammo, bombs & shots are used is very entertaining in and of itself because not only is it impressive, but it shows that the player knows what they are doing instead of hopefully dying just to get a refill.
However, Its very hard for me to really decide since most of the points adressed by other users are very vauge and cryptic. There are other games for arcades which act like console games. Take
Nemo for example. I believe that this game might actually cause even more controversy than the Metal Slug runs, but thats for another time.
All in all, Im in between "Yes" and "No, but will allow exceptions."
And here are some of mine:
Optimized.
