If you watch enough Zero Punctuation reviews, you'll eventually get used to it.

Actually. I was playing co-op Umbrella Chronicles and my friend and I were having a really hard time because I think it was both of our first times playing a game with that mechanic. Are you supposed to press the button once? hold it down? press it repeatedly?

There's a section where you have to do it to avoid an explosion in an alley way, and after dying 3 times because we didn't press the button properly, we just stopped playing.

I hate it in every game ever. People try to think they're all innovative and call them QTEs for quick-time-events. The only Quick Time Event I know is the buggy video software that fucks up my computer. It's like every game developer in the world wants every scene in their game to be as epic as trying to aim a photon torpedo into an air conditioning space-vent on the Death Star, but since that's impossible, they just tell you when to do it, and hope it doesn't ruin the epic cutscene. It's over-used and under-fun'd.

Stof, I loved Umbrella Chronicles, but yeah, those parts sucked ass. They're few and far between, but they ruin everything when you're in the zone waxing zombies, and then BAM, you get hit by a car because you didn't press a random button in time.

 If it constantly shrinks and resizes your suppose to do it repeatedly. Other wise just press it once. Either of you press the wrong button you lose. And I agree it's annoying as hell as quick time events generally are.

Dragon's Lair and Space Ace arcade games were based soley on the concept of pushing buttons at the right time. They were a lot of fun in their day those two games.

I did not mind it in RE4, but could see how this would annoy people.

I'm okay with those button press events when they are done sparingly in a game and they make sense.

Like someone pointed out the COD4 opening, I actually liked that, because it's one of the few times it happens in the game and the button makes sense (A and X are the jump buttons in game).

I think it's over done these days, especially with action games (curse GoW for that one)

I found the interactive cut scenes in RE4 to be a blast. It's not so much that it didn't challenge my intellect or treated me like a 2 year old, it's an exercise in reflexes and timing of which I think are important video game playing traits.

I dare anyone to call the knife fight in RE4 an insult to their intelligence without lying to themselves in the process.

I recently got Uncharted (great game that is it) but there are a few of these, and whn I say a few, I mean like 3 or 4 only and I always think it's a normal cut scene when suddenly it's asking me to push a button and I die. Annoying as hell but I learn from my mistakes.

 We had the same problem in the same scene, in fact I've seen the same issue in just about every one of these "press X button now" games.  Re4's use of it was just moronic and God of War way way over uses this gameplay mechanic.  I've always sucked at that play mechanic and I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates it.

As for the particular scene you had issues with, when we played that section we died like 6 times and out of the blue for no apparent reason by doing the same thing we did the other 6 times it worked.

It is an insult.  You watch a cutscene and you press buttons when the messages pop up.  You're not watching your opponent and looking for an opening, or trying to anticipate where an attack will come from.  You're just watching for the next message.  I don't want to be watching a cutscene and pressing buttons, I want to be in the scene, controlling my character and participating in the battle.