I have to say Age of Empires 1 and 2 as well. Played on easy difficulty and for first 40-60 minutes I always got all the upgrades, made as much workers as possible, build gates and walls, placed the castles nicely. Then I butchered almost all workers, when I had rediculous amount of resources, and made an army of war elephants, catapults and what not. Then depending on my mood, I either send only smaller forces to fight the enemy, so that the match would last longer and I would have time to test different strategies and units, or I just ran down the enemy without them being able to react much at all. Sometimes I played defense games, where I let the enemy to have bigger army and tried to defend as long as possible. It was also extreme fun to make two huge armies of different units in the editor mode and clash them together, and see which side wins. I don't dare to guess how many times and in how many different variations I have done that.
I also did something rather unique, I made maps for hours in the editor mode, and made a story in my head. There could be, for example, a princess, that was being escorted by soldiers back to kingdom. There would barbarians attacking them, and the they would run into neutral cities helping them with the mission, walking though endless mountains and meadows. It was always fun to see would the escortee survive. Sometimes I was bit devasted, if my story got messed up by some barbarian being bit too trigger happy with those throwing axes or I just estimated the amount of units completely wrong. Editor mode is something I still appreciate a lot in games, game lacks a soul without that, for me.
I loved the music, sounds, characters, the sandbox nature, the balance of complexity and simplicity, pace. Pretty much everything was and is right about AoE.
After realizing how RTS games a really played upon playing Starcraft, my experiences with RTS games have left quite bitter taste in mouth. Couldn't play relaxedly anymore, couldn't think about the placement of that castle for ages, everything just had to be effecient as possible. For me building a nice looking city was more important, and combat that doesn't need millisecond reaction time. So I guess I passed the old school gamer mark as I started to play more TBS games.
There's a lot of PC games from the early 90's that I love, but AoE is there in between the older and the newer games, it doesn't really age just like good music, movies and books. It's not like one of those simplistic console side scroller games you liked as a kid or teenager, which you today find quite uncompelling regardless of the strong nostalgic feelings associated with them, AoE still offers endless potential for fun, and is potentially perhaps rivalled only by Rise of Nations in some areas.
And from this we can conclude that I'm a huge nerd!

I have played only handful of RPG's in my life, haven't even touched a JRPG, so I have still long way to go before I can earn my gaming nerd ribbon.