Button Mashing....Serious Business

Things such as APM (Actions Per Minute) are an important aspect of games such as Starcraft, but APM has been an important concept to many gamers way before people started playing Real Time Strategy games seriously.

What you are looking at in the above picture is something known as the Hudson Shuwatch (or Shooting Watch) and it was designed for players to practise and improve their skills at the top down shooters of the time.

If you play a top down shooter now, you may be familiar with the idea that you can just hold down the fire button and the ship or whatever it is you are controlling will just fire constantly.  Well, back in the day people didn't have it so easy, you had to mash, and mash hard if you wanted a fast rate of fire.  So not only did the old school shoot em' ups test your spacial awareness, but also your ability to mash like a motherfucker.

The idea behind the Shuwatch, as far as I understand it, is that it let you test your mashing ability and gave you something to practise with outside of the game.  As far as I know it didn't do much else, but the existence of this thing just blows my mind.

I know that I'm going to be hunting one of these things down in the local retro shops so if I pick one up I'll do a video of it in action or something.