Here you have a list:
- Doom and Doom 2.
- X-Com UFO Defense.
- Soul Reaver.
- System Shock 2.
- Unreal.
- Fallout 2.
- Heroes of Might and Magic 3.
- Planescape Torment.
- Gothic.
- Morrowind.
- Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines.

There are some interesting titles here and there on such lists, but in general they contain lots of duds and rank games in a very strange way.

I am quite amazed by a rather low quality of US and UK computer entertainment magazines from that period in general. I guess the advertisers money completely spoiled them.

Megatraveller 1 and 2
Darklands 1992
Evil Islands (( If you wanna get into rage of mages, skip to evil islands its epic)
Ultima series
Magic candle series
Realms of Arkania trilogy
Arcanum of steamworks and magick obscura
Fallout 1-2
Serpant in the staglands (Retro not old) well kinda geting old now
The guild 2
Lurking 2 a madness (itch.io) Gog turned it down, lame
Space Rangers Hd
Ev nova (Escape velocity nova)
Evochron legacy
Darkdire (Steam and itch.io) Underrated gem

Surprised nobody mentioned Jagged alliance 2 and Commandos

I just have two recommendations.
1. Diablo 2(You can dive right in without playing Diablo 1, like I did when I bought D2, but if you love the story D1 is available here on GOG and as I'm playing it myself, I can say it's a solid game, even though 2 is much better). I digress, but Diablo 2 is one of my all time favorites among RPGs. The combat is challenging but fair, the skill trees for each class open up vast amounts of variation in the builds you can make and you can get some awesome set items.
2. Total Annihilation. An RTS that decided to throw out the finite-per-map resource systems so many RTS games were using in favor of two resources that are gathered or made by structures at a constant rate. If this sounds too easy, keep in mind that resource generation only gets easy at advanced tech levels. Also, unlike in some RTS games where you can only make hotkey-groups of 12 units at a time(looking at you Starcraft+Warcraft) you can have groups of any size, limited only by how many you want to produce within the parameters of the unit cap, which can be set to be quite large in Skirmish mode.

psychonauts

an old classic I would dearly love to see updated and remastered: Birthright: A Gorgons Alliance

Pong.
Consistent action with no real downtime. Multi-player. Light on plot and RPG elements though.