I hate quick-time events. All right-thinking gamers hate quick-time events. Every time I hear some incoming game cheats out with one of these blatant button-pressing sequences, where prompts flash up on-screen telling you what to do and giving you half a second to do it, an angel dies. My console might as well dispense a food pellet for pushing button real good.

Sure, they seemed cool at first. Here's a clever way to keep you involved in the action during a cut-scene instead of passively sitting there like some drooling, television-watching slob. Some classic games use quick-time events -- Shenmue (its creator, Yu Suzuki, even coined the phrase), Resident Evil 4, Alan Wake, God of War, every God of War clone -- but the QTEs aren't what make them classics. They're what make otherwise legendary games tedious, and they're becoming ridiculously common.

Press the A button to find sailors.

Except quick-time events were central to one of my favorite games of 2010. Indeed, I'd argue its largely QTE-driven gameplay made this title one of the best games of its generation.

How? By doing what QTEs are actually supposed to do.

When you think about it, many games -- particularly games with a complex combo system -- use mechanics that are identical to your basic quick-time event. Joystick down, roll forward, hit button...that's how you launch a fireball in Street Fighter 2. They just don't give you the on-screen prompts. And timing's everything.

Quick-time events, on the other hand, allow actions outside the normal control scheme. Unless he'll be doing it throughout God of War, "Kratos rips cyclops' eyeball out" doesn't merit a space on the face buttons. But once he wails on Mr. Cyclops for a bit, instructions pop up to inform you it's eyeball-ripping time, and more prompts walk you through the details. We can make Kratos do anything because we're not limited to the moves assigned to our controller.

God of War's spectacularly gruesome finishers, wherein Kratos offs yet another deity in an awesomely god-worthy way, would be tough to pull off without using quick-time events. Too bad the QTEs themselves are so banal, artless, and boring.

Press the X button to destroy everything.

Whether it's God of War, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, or Tomb Raider: Anniversary, the song remains the same. The game orders players to perform simple, timed, random button presses on command. Success results in something cool happening. Failure dooms you to endless repetition until you get it right or instant death...and then repetition until you get it right. More often than not, it feels entirely pointless. Pushing a control stick left to move left makes sense; pressing the X button to dodge left doesn't, particularly since you'll never use the X button that way again. Rather than keep us in the moment, QTEs like these are merely chores.

But what they do wrong, Heavy Rain does right.

Quantic Dream's Hitchcockian mystery game bypasses anything resembling a normal control scheme, and it shifts to quick-time events for every action sequence. But rather than static Press X Button Now riffs, Heavy Rain uses its QTEs to excite the imagination.

In one sequence, bad people force lead character Ethan to race down a highway against oncoming traffic. Cars bear down on you, and when a prompt suddenly jumps on-screen, you feel the same hit of panic Ethan does...and the prompt itself shakes with that panic. In indecisive moments, options appear and vanish. When performing delicate work, you're required to press and hold increasingly complex button sequences until you're practically playing Twister on your controller.

Press the circle button OR I'LL KILL YOU!

Heavy Rain keeps changing things up, but what you do physically always jibes with what's happening in the game, keeping you right in the moment.

Best of all, missing a cue doesn't instantly end the game or loop it on repeat. You're allowed a few mistakes. That's a huge difference from titles where your character takes a royal beating in-game and dies from a single miscue in a QTE. In Heavy Rain, you suffer for your mistakes, but they aren't immediately fatal. Keep making them and consequences follow, up to and including the permanent death of a playable character and the loss of all their missions that follow.

Quick-time events have weight in Heavy Rain because repetition isn't a factor. The game keeps going whether you're winning or losing, and that's what a quick-time event should do: move things forward. The recent fallback to simplistic rinse/repeat challenges and their press/reward dynamic have got to go. The QTE worth playing acts as gameplay through other means, telling the story it wants to tell...with your participation.