I liked Fallout 1, really. Because, see, it was like an actual role playing role playing game. If you were smart, you could get experience by teaching people things (crop rotation, Shady Sands)... if you were a fighter, sure, you had an easier time with a lot of combat-oriented challenges. I even read that if you had a good enough combination of speech and charisma, you could convince the Master boss to give up his goals and consequentially commit suicide instead of fighting you... wow, a way of conquering a large and difficult obstacle without the use of brutality on the part of the player character? Originality if ever I saw it, or at least an uncommon thing in the sea of alleged RPGs we endure on a daily basis.
Granted, many of the skills and attributes were still relatively underrepresented. Some problems had only one solution, and that was usually shooting them repeatedly the largest gun available. But even so, it was a step in the right direction; there's still a decent amount of stuff that makes you feel like there's more to the world than just kill kill level up sell buy kill kill win... makes you feel like your character is, y'know, a freakin' character... And not just some sort of humanoid robot that's good at killing and gradually gets better at it.
I'd also like to say Planescape Torment, but that's really more a sort of interactive illustrated novel than an RPG... it still gets a mention for having really, really good writing, though. And lots of it.
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