ha!

pretty silly stuff

thanks

The RPG's I would recommend from that era:

Wizardry 6-7 - This was essentially a reboot of the wizardry franchise, but it added in more of a story and expanded the game from previous versions. Wizardry 7 is one of my all time favorite RPG's. You can also import characters from 6 into 7. Wizardry 6 is exploring an old castle while Wizardry 7 has many towns, wilderness, npc's, and dungeon's to explore. I would play the dos version of Wizardry 7, I think it is a lot better than the windows version. Just make sure you spend time to get good roles on your characters - even if it is time consuming.

Gold Box - I personally found the Krynn series to be better than the Pools series. I thought they had a more interesting story and better used their setting. I would rate the series as: Krynn, Pools, Savage Frontier, Buck Rogers. After checking out some of the original games it may be worth your time to check out Unlimited Adventures.

Lands of Lore 1 - I consider it the best of the Dungeon Master style games. I would suggest this over Eye of the Beholder, Anvil of Dawn, or similar games.

Eye of the Beholder - I liked the series as a whole, the second game was my favorite.

Might and Magic 3-5 - They were fun, but I find them to be less memorable than many of the other games.

Repent! I dare you, repent or you will suffer for Eternity in hell!

How dare of you to put Buck Rogers last! Just because it was the only D&D ever in Space (at this time) it already deserves first place, it was genre-breaking (me thinks ;) )

But the beauty with the old games, I think, there were more choices and always a game/genre for every taste.

Nowadays I find that too much effort is put into the graphics and not enough into the gameplay/story (yes there are exceptions).

I somewhere read an interesting article of Lord British about his Ultima-Series and yes you can see his different ideas reflected in his games (working of memory here and sorry no link). Same true for some other classic me thinks.

Why do I bring it up (again^^), quite easy it all just depends on your taste which one too choose. But I also think that the replay value of the older games is a wee bit higher. Yes due to HW-limitations they were far more linear, but due too the far more randomness like in battle or similar every game plays a wee bit different. One example being Buck Rogers, trying to fight against the pirate boss comes there to my mind ;) .

Just think of Diabolo, yes nice RPG (I liked to play it), but haven't really replayed it since, sometimes I do feel a wee bit like replaying, but .......I don't know.

To be really frankly, I think those oldies all deserve to be played again (and again and again......) ;) oh and dtgreene, just as a side note, would be good, if you already give such a (really) good overview, could you refrain from using those abbreviation, please ;) (reaaly had to think hard about some of those or at least write them out :D)
and
for me there are only RPGs in the old days, this classification is rather new only so hence, IMHO, shall not be applied backwards, or?