I literally worshipped the Might and Magic series, all right up until that stinker of a sequel came out a year ago, Dark Messiah. They took a tried and true awesome explorative interface and turned the whole series into an Oblivion rip-off... bloody Ubisoft! The 3DO prequels to that were amazing though. Mandate of Heaven was one of my favorites, but then Day of the Destroyer let you play DRAGONS! (albeit baby ones) That had to be the most fun ever, when you could take the whole party and ride dragonback with his "flight" ability. A party of 2 dragons and a mage and a healer was devastating! I also miss being able to play as a minotaur, heheh.
Wizardry was another good party-explorer CRPG. They had funny little alien races and mixed sci fi tech with faantasy sword and sorcery pretty well. Number 8, Dark Savant was one of my favorites since the main villain was some crazed alien tyrant in black platemail and tons of strange robot guards. You even got to play these cute little fuzzy muppet things that made great engineers and used aquebuses and lasers and such. I miss that format most of all, the turn-based 3d party crawler where you got to make 4-5 different characters. Character creation and flexibility switching them out makes the RPGs so much fun, nowadays they only ever let you control or make one guy and the rest just run around berserking around you and doing their own thing, getting the party killed.
That's why I like Icewind Dale so much, they just let you make everybody and explore. The chatty NPCs from NWN and NWN2 are nice, but they really limit replayability when you're ripping your hair out because that NWN2 tiefling's voice is SO BLOODY ANNOYING! I think she's the same voice actress who played the twilek rogue in Knights of the Old Republic... I can't stand that voice.
I got the Zork Anthology long ago and have to admit I still fire it up from time to time, especially Zork Zero. The Return to Zork playdisk I have in my car since back in the day all the major PC games on CD-Rom used to use full CD-Audio tracks and could be played on any stereo system. That Dwarven City song with the tuba and cowbells I usually set to repeat and not get tired of it for up to a half hour at a time.
