>Why is it that people who always complain and spread the meme that arcade games are designed from the ground up to mercilessly rape your wallet have never 1cc'd an arcade game in their lives?
You don't know that to be true.
>There's a ton of 1cc videos out there of most arcade games, obviously it's not impossible to beat these games without losing all your lives or even dying at all, and it's not like all of them are cleared by Japanese players.
You say this like you think those people didn't spend countless hours getting good enough at the game to clear it without dying. If you spent X number of quarters on a game in order to practice and get good at it, so that you could then get to the point where you're so good at the game that you only need one quarter to complete it, then you did exactly what the designers wanted you to do; YOU GAVE THEM MICROTRANSACTIONS YOU NIGGER
>if you could die an infinite amount of times, why bother with fair challenge and good design? What kind of punishment can exist if you can infinitely keep retrying?
In most games in which offer infinite retries, the player will be punished in some other way, such as with loss of progress. Arcade games give the opportunity to save time by feeding them quarters so you can keep playing mid level. That, or they'll let you start over from the beginning of the most recent level.
>Give quarter
>Get retry
<If not, then start over from the beginning of the game
<Choose to start over and you still have to pay the price of admission
The point being, that this scheme says nothing about the quality of the game itself, it merely speaks to the way that the developer decided to monetize their product. As for "fair and decent challenge", you're basically talking out of your ass. What do you mean by this? You could find examples of arcade coinbait and console/PC games alike that both have "fair and decent challenges" and that are filled to the brim with bullshit.
>Essentially it's no different from the savescumming argument where because savescumming exists, saving every five seconds is fine in most cases.
So, you're saying that because in some games, it is possible to save an infinite number of times, it's fine to save in an exploitative way in order to circumvent some challenge or otherwise place yourself in an advantageous situation? Most games don't let you do this, though. Most games dictate when you can and cannot save your game. For example, you can't save during a boss fight or when you're in the middle of combat.
Sure, some people will save right before the boss fight so they can save themselves the time of going through the level, but this is only ever possible in games like RPGs in which you can save virtually anywhere as long as you're not fighting an enemy. Outside of that, if you're talking about save states in emulators, then I don't consider those to be "real" saves because they're not baked into the game. They're a hack of sorts that lets you read the while from the last point in time it was running. That shit doesn't count, though I do agree that it is kind of cheap to use said feature.
>Nobody would blame you if you were to say "having to practice to actually beat a singleplayer videogame is not for me", but then to present traits inherent to arcade games as objective flaws and design failures instead of recognizing how the game is designed around those traits is just utter bullshit.
Maybe you should give an example of an arcade game that you think has "fantastic game design" and then defend it from any given criticism instead of being so fucking vague.