40 years on, time to bury the Quick-Time Event in a cement grave 100m down...Press X, Square, Triangle then Circle in quick succession if you agree...

 

Oh Yu! Yu as in Yu Suzuki, not the inventor of one of the most insidious and prevalent curses on videogaming, but certainly a chap who popularised their use. Yu Suzuki's game "Shenmue" was probably the first time I remember getting really thoroughly and truly angry enough at a game to toss the Dreamcast pad aside (not too hard though, those things cost a fortune at the time), removing the disk from the game console's drive never to be played again. Nope, I never completed Shenmue - largely thanks to the Quick-Time Events that raddled the thing. 

What are they? Why do I hate them? Well here are a few juicy examples that show this lazy-arsed piece of game design off and how truly infuriating they can be...

One button press missed can be the difference between you succeeding, or failing a level only to be dragged kicking and screaming through a lengthy cut scene, and the same damned QTE again (worse still if the developers are the sort of sadistic bastards who love to change up the button in QTEs randomly, so you can't even plan for what's coming). 

Though they hark back to the 80s and those laserdisk games that relied on fleecing you for as much cash as possible by introducing these nasty time-sensitive button presses, they're unfortunately still around today and as I've been working my way through a back-catalogue of this generation's PS4 games that I never got round to finishing, I have truly come to hate these things with renewed passion. 

Take "Until Dawn" - On paper one of the most brilliantly realised horror games of this gen, a tense interactive horror movie where you're tasked with keeping a happy and horny bunch of teenagers alive for as long as possible. The entire game is absolutely raddled with QTEs, and it's as unforgiving as hell. One slip of the finger, one misremembered button press (and I will never, EVER forgive Sony for the placing of the Square and Circle buttons, I can't be the only one who still gets those suckers mixed up in my head like some crazy left-right blindness) and your hapless teen goes plunging off a cliff onto the unforgiving rocks below, never to be seen alive again. 

I also recently worked through "Days Gone" which had a fair few of them too, mostly in places where the game's excrutiatingly long load times would kick in if you failed one. Hateful, hateful, hateful. 

They are the developers revenge against all those nasty little gamers who take to their blogs or public forums to slate a particular game's design flaws (the irony of that statement is not lost on me, don't worry) and as a revenge weapon they are absolutely and completely effective, particularly if you're an old gamer like me whose reaction times are getting worse than a Nexus 5 with a dodgy servo or two. 

Will they ever disappear entirely? I doubt it. I think even with the dawn of a new console generation upon us, you'll at least see them in the upcoming "Spider-Man: Miles Morales" (because they seem to go hand in glove with Spider-Man games for some reason, see the above video for some horrific examples) and I am also convinced you'll see them in the next "Horizon: Zero Dawn". Even 'innovative' game makers like David Cage (he of "Jason, JASON, JASON!" fame) loves them so much that he seems entirely incapable of moving beyond them to think of new ways to torture players (though some of his lengthier and cheesy as hell dialogue could be counted as a new exquisite form of torture for some players). 

Looking at my shelves and the crop of PS4 titles taking up the most space, I can count at least 20 games there that feature these dratted things, and of that 20 I'd say I'd somehow managed to grit my teeth and complete at least 16, the four remaining being just too frustrating and the wrong side of fun for me to ever bother with again. 

QTEs deserve to join loot boxes, unskippable cut scenes and wankerish developers who insist yon "Press the Start Button" AND NO OTHER BUTTON to begin your game.