In the God of War series you have to press a sequence of buttons to accomplish a particular task, typically the killing of a creature, or defense against an event.
Another example may be in Resident Evil 4 when they roll the boulder at you in the introductory stages, and you're forced to tap A furiously, until it suddenly asks for either both A and B or both shoulder buttons.
Well, I understand what you mean but I haven't had a console since the Intellivision days.
I'm sure there's an equivalent in some PC game, like a platform puzzler?