The public library is a really good resource if you're in a large city; I was able to find a lot through that. I highly recommend not only checking for dvd/blu ray selection, but also seeing if your library offers services like Kanopy or Hoopla which have really strong and interesting selections. I also lived at home for a bit this year, and my dad has TCM, so I got him to PVR me a bunch of stuff before I stayed there. Other than that, streaming options. Youtube has some good stuff that's either in the public domain or copyright holders don't seem care about taking down. A surprising amount of Japanese films with decent prints.

I definitely couldn't list 20 films I really dug this year (maybe a dozen?), as I've only seen about 40 2018 releases. I'm always a bit behind the curve when it comes to modern movies, but there's always that feeling of trying to fit in a couple more, just because film discourse really intensifies at the end of the year!

In my watching, I spent a good portion of this year hammering out the 1930's. Probably watched over 100 from that decade.

Mission Impossible Fallout, The Sisters Brothers, Mandy, A Quiet Place (?)

Realizing how little attention I pay to film posters! Thinking of some of my favorites of the year, I couldn't imagine their posters.

Black Bird

Onion Games' third title, a gothic horizontal shmup that plays like Fantasy Zone with a storyline inspired by Hans Christian Andersen. Like the developer's other games, it seems simple at first, but scoring and the amount of detail put into are really rewarding. It's worth playing just for the stylized pixel art and Taniguchi's (Chibi Robo, Chulip) wonderful gibberish opera soundtrack; the presentation is top notch, which is necessary for an arcade-y title like this. If there's something I could criticize it for, it's that the writing is really minimal. Kimura is a great writer, and a lot of my appreciation for their previous games is because of his lore and dialogue, and it's pretty absent here. It's possible the true, true ending (beating the game on the more difficult mode with a high score that less than 50 people on Steam have achieved) reveals more about the fascinating world they've created, but I haven't got that one yet.

This one runs $20 which might be a bit steep, but keep an eye out for a sale if you like unique arcade titles and want to support some industry veterans going independent.

Million Onion Hotel

Onion Games' second effort might be a match-5 phone game, but it's one with a manic, whack-a-mole gameplay loop; an overwhelming, splashy visual style; and an absurd, melancholic storyline about mutually assured destruction. The writing is really funny, and though it can be beaten in about 20 minutes, unlockable pieces of lore and high-scoring had me turning it back on for another run when I had downtime. I really liked it, and I've bought and have been playing their third game, Black Bird recently which is also great.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

All Gold Canyon and The Gal Who Got Rattled are great---reminded me of Hemingway and O'Connor short stories. The rest of the stories can go screw.

Return of the Obra Dinn

Very, very good. Love the use of tableaux and the art style. Like Papers Please, Pope is able to fit emotion and character between the lines, in spite of fatalism and the administrative paperwork that acts the game's catalyst. It is a straightforward doomed seafaring tale, but the non-linear execution that asks the player to consider every soul on board naturally leads into investigating what each person knows, when they know it, and why they act the way they do, which is where the real drama lies.

Also it's just really, really cool. A game where you play as an insurance adjuster shouldn't be this cool.

I have zero problems with emulation as outlined in your third paragraph. Stuff that's out of print or not for sale by a publisher or digital store, I say go for it. As far as that popularizing emulation, I mean maybe, but it also popularizes the games themselves as well. You can bet that there are a lot of cult classics that wouldn't be as popular or well-regarded without emulation (think of the Mother series for example), and the democratization of game ROMs actually helps to preserve the games themselves.

Part Time UFO

This is by HAL Laboratory for phones, and it's absolutely of the quality of presentation you'd expect. There's great art, lots of costumes, and levels are short with fun optional objectives. The problem is that the central gameplay is really simple: you fly a UFO with a grab-crane and manipulate physical objects in 2D space. You transfer and stack and try to keep things from toppling over. It does a lot with that premise, but it's a thin premise, and the game never really breaks out of it.

It's cute, but it's not a whole lot more than that.

SMT: Digital Devil Saga 2

Interesting in that it has different strengths and weaknesses than the first game. I got messed up by the story, particularly in party arrangement. Every time I was building a character, they left---and I sort of liked how mean that was, how I was forced to make do without a proper healer or someone proficient in a certain element. Looking back, there's definitely an optimal party, but my shit luck made the game more of a skin-of-the-teeth experience which I like. It's shorter than the first, which is great, and the character work is stronger than the first game.

Yet there isn't much in the way of environmental diversity and the dungeons are pretty weak; just a series of hallways and locked doors. DDS1 and Nocturne were definitely more imaginative in that department. Also the endgame is pretty balls; again, weak dungeon design but also man the bosses, yuck. I had an interesting time with the last boss, who I had a real fuck-tussle with on the first go, making it to its last form completely unprepared. Then after reloading, I reset my skills with everything I needed and proceeded to get slammed by crits and status effects in the first couple forms. Ended up taking me like 10 tries. Sometimes those dice rolls don't go your way, but I swear the game hated me.

Overall I liked it better than the first, though not top-shelf SMT.

edit: The Neverhood is great though!

I like point and clicks, but I especially like ones with great art and a sense of humor. Only left mouseclick too!---no finicky action commands or inventory. Some of the backtracking and puzzles can be a bit of a pain in the ass (the mouse puzzle, geez), but the world and the presentation are excellent.