Welding

@wheresderrick Never heard about the casino level with the band!
I love that kind of stuff (and have to commend the rest of the band for continuing to play when their bassist just got shot dead).

This is a random thought I had while playing Yakuza Kiwami: I was doing the fight through the Chinese restaurant and was fighting a number of chefs and Chinese mob goons in the restaurant's kitchen. As I was luring over a chef to slam his head into a stove and building up the right amount of Heat to dramatically disarm one of the goons something dawned on me:

Yakuza is the ultimate fight choreography simulator.

I've been a fan of the Yakuza games since playing Yakuza for the PS2. When I started playing the first Yakuza as a teen, a friend of mine happened to be over and from that point on I would never play it without him on the couch. I'd control the game and he'd watch it as if he was watching an insane martial arts movie. When I played these games I wasn't playing to beat the game's challenges, but to entertain my friend. I would look for situations where I could pull off the game's (oftentimes incredibly specific) Heat Moves not for their damage-output, but for their cinematic value.

Only when I was recently playing Kiwami did it occur to me that I was still playing that same way, even without my friend with me on the couch. I was having fun with the Yakuza combat not because I felt profoundly challenged at my skill in the game; I was trying to put together the coolest looking martial arts fight I could and having a blast doing it.

I started thinking about this more when I saw Dan play through Yakuza 0. His gripes with the combat definitely have merit, but I think the biggest reason that he never had fun with it because he was playing to beat the game instead of playing to put together rad looking fight scenes.

What do you guys think? Are there any other games you play for aesthetics rather than challenge?

MGS5. But I personally enjoyed the overall experience of the PS3 version of Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker more.

It's got a ton of fun upgrading and bite-sized stealth missions. Better story than MGS5 in my opinion as well.
You fight a ton of giant robots.

It definitely bothers me for Battle Chef Brigade.

I think comparing it to Pyre doesn't work at all; as they are both trying to do very different things: Battle Chef Brigade is attempting smooth combo-based combat, Pyre is a visual novel. When combat does happens in Pyre, the characters are fully (and I will say, beautifully) animated.

The size of the character sprites and their lack of animation really turns me off of Battle Chef Brigade.

As a rule of thumb, the smaller the sprite, the less frames are needed to convey motion.

King of Dragon's Pass really revealed to me my love for personal strategy games, and got me back in a big way.

King of Dragon's Pass, every year. I still play that game a ton and there is nothing quite like it.

The combination of RPG, text adventure and clan management is so incredibly unique and appealing.
There are not many games where one has to learn about the fictional universe and it's cultures in order to perform well at the game; and that's a shame.

If you're going to bring that kind of imagery into the room, you should have something interesting to say about it.

This had nothing to say about the violence, the characters or the game.

The inclusion of a subject isn't the problem; the reason for it's inclusion, or lackthereof, is the problem.

I like reading good books and I like reading well written videogames.

Try playing Supergiant Games' Pyre.

Abby is killing it!