John Romero spoke out against continues. He claimed that they killed arcade games. He's right, even though it was a slow & subtle death. The average player does not want to try to sit there & do some kinda indepth formal analysis of a game's systems, that's a privilege they'll grant to games they already like. They're there to enjoy a game, so they want clarity of vision, even if it's forceful on some level. No amount of "but 1cc's!" and "look at the score tho!!!" changes that simple fact.
I think the whole mechanic was a short sighted business decision that cost arcade genres in the long run. It's an abomination of game design and devs should completely abandon it. Thankfully this is already happening and devs are independently realizing how shitty the mechanic is, but it can't happen fast enough.
Early arcade games had no continues period - you put in a coin, played as long as you could, got a game over, and that was that. You could put in another coin and start again. But when they said "game over" they actually meant it. Most games of this type were infinitely looping and were purely about competing for scores, but not all of them. You can even see this design as late as Gradius.
I forget which game pioneered continues, but somewhere along the way games gave players the ability to pay up and restart from a checkpoint. This was a really solid compromise because while you made the game a lot easier by paying, it wasn't free - you had to pick up some basic skills to finish it. Players had to pay attention, they had to understand the basic language of the games.
All of this changed when on-the-spot continues were introduced. Now, instead of actually needing skills, players could pop in a coin and continue from where they left off. This mechanic in particular spread like wildfire and very quickly became the standard. By the 90's, it was rare to see games use checkpoint systems at all. It's easy to see why it was so influential - this was really profitable short term because the casual crowd would pour coins into the machines to see the content & ending instead of getting a single game over and leaving. But as a result, the devs started framing the games as worthless, disposable junk food. They set them up for failure long term by undermining one of the most powerful motivators for improving - completion.
This sorta stuff leads to a death spiral - the more people credit feed, the less they'll learn the language of the games, the less they learn, the more they see the games as disposable, and the more they credit feed. When this carries on for years, the reputation of the games becomes solidified, player skill/understanding stagnates, and so do the critics. The chicken really came home to roost well into the console era where arcade ports were like alien artifacts to players - they simply had no idea what to do with them. And it hit genres like beat 'em ups particularly hard, because unlike shmups which had their R-Types and Gradiuses as an anchor point, bmups were pretty much born in an era of on-the-spot continues. They had no chance to establish any kind of sizable niche because everything was against them. Devs tried to keep people in the arcades and as a result made arcadey design completely unviable outside of the arcades in the process. And eventually even inside the arcades.
It's no surprise that when indies re-implement checkpoints or force 1cc's, they tend to get quite the reputations. You might even hear some "dark souls of x" or "thinking man's x" being mentioned now and then. And even though this reputation of being too hard, too punishing, too clunky, too unfair, too oldschool, might seem bad - it isn't. It's a massive upgrade compared to how the games were seen before - as a worthless piece of junk to consume passively & discard. Arcade game devs shouldn't be afraid of scaring players, they should embrace it.
So yeah, fuck continues. Bring back checkpoints, make players feel some pain & scare the shit outta them. We should aspire to make games that are true to themselves but simply to cool to ignore. Rather than trying to dull & soften them - there's already enough of that shit out there.
boy i think about this concept a lot in relation to Cult Classic Franchise Dead Rising
adding frequent checkpoints into your survival horror game that can rewind time to the most recent loading zone on death, or even on command, sure zaps a Hell Of A Lot of the "survival" (and some of the "horror", arguably) out of your game that was already heavily skewed into the "survival" element of survival horror to begin with
like yeah i guess it's more approachable as your day 1 launch title for the xbone (lol) but it sure sucks the feeling out
