My first exposure to CRPGs were in the 1980s, most notably Ultima, Pool of Radiance and Telengard. I really liked the latter because it wasn't encumbered with a story line, it was a dungeon crawler for the sake of being a dungeon crawler. My favorite part of CRPGs is the character creation phase.
When I was creating my own retro CRPG in 2009 (Realms of Quest III.video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DMBlCaDlD8 website:
http://realmsofquest.blogspot.com ) I was researching the net about the history of RPGs and Gamasutra had mentioned Oubliette (
http://www.gamasutra.com...istory_of_computer_.php ) as one of the earliest examples of party-based CRPGs. Needless to say, I tried to find out almost everything about it. That it pre-dated Wizardry was what made it seem extra cool to me.
Kind of like why I prefer looking at D&D manuals that were made pre-1985, I also prefer the old CRPG games. It's not really about nostalgia, I just really like the aesthetics of simpler and eye-pleasing graphics. I think there's beauty in wireframe dungeons and black & white art printed on white paper. I tried playing World of Warcraft, but the excessive graphics-driven game while a technical marvel, is just overwhelming.
So I have the C64, MS-DOS, iPod Touch and Android versions of Oubliette. I'm really looking forward to the iPad version as that has basically become my favorite gaming device.