Ryan333: I'll probably be branded a heretic by some, but I really didn't care for the old SSI Gold Box D&D games even though I'm a huge CRPG fan. The two biggest hang-ups I had with them were (1) lack of an auto-map and (2) party-based combat that was real-time/non-pause. At least... I think they were all real-time. Were any of them pauseable?
I much prefer games like Baldur's Gate or Fallout over the classic SSI games. But I still have to tip my hat to the Gold Box series. Even if I didn't care for the style, they were very influential and well-designed games in their own right.
When I was in college, I had SSI's Eye of the Beholder on my old MS-DOS 386 system. I didn't play it much, but this guy who lived down the hall from me in the dorm was constantly coming over asking if he could play. I kind of felt sorry for him because his parents were outrageously rich, yet they sent him off to college without a car, computer, TV, stereo... or pretty anything other than a few sets of clothes. Although I finally drew the line when I went to bed one night and told him he could keep playing for a bit... and then woke up the next morning to find him still sitting there at my computer. He was kind of like a hipster-doofus version of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory -- nowhere near as smart but every bit as oblivious to how socially inept he was. Whenever I think about an SSI Gold Box game, I can still see him sitting there at my computer, completely engrossed with Eye of the Beholder.
1. The games had Area View for most maps.
2. They were turn based, not real time. Eye of the Beholder was pure real time, though.
But cool story about your college friends, so I won't dowrep you.