I don't play currently, but I did voluntarily play a game back in 1994. I wasn't into D&D at that point in time, but then, as now, it was the most popular game, and the most available. Character creation is usually pretty simple. It's fun to comb through books to find cool options in a game that doesn't necessarily offer a lot of customization. Probably the best thing about it is the spells, which are quirky, powerful, and not bounded by artificial constraints of balance.
The last time I played, I rolled up a wizard, making me one of two wizards in an eight-person party. There came to a juncture in the session where we were being pursued by an extraordinary number of goblins. At one point, we were fighting a withdrawal down a narrow hallway. And all at once, I and the other wizard player looked at each other, and we nodded, as we silently agreed what was to be done. He cast grease, causing a whole mess of goblins to start slipping and falling in front of us, and increasing the problem of the bottleneck for our foes. The I cast flaming sphere, at the limit of its range, and rolled the sphere toward us, violently burning a half dozen goblins. There were a few survivors, so the next round, I declared my intention to roll the sphere back the other way. At that point, the DM simply declared we could hear the pitiful, dying screams of goblins as the rest of the mob beat a hasty retreat. The DM apologized to me for previously disparaging the combat utility of flaming sphere, which has a duration of 1 round/level. And that's what it's good about AD&D 2e. Ridiculous, almost cartoon-ishly dangerous scenarios; classic, goony bad guys; brutally efficient use of strange spells; high-fives.
Combat in later editions isn't as deadly, or swingy. In AD&D, failing a saving throw against a fireball often meant something was dead. Flaming sphere in 3e is depressingly survivable, even for goblins, and grease offers a fairly generous saving throw. AD&D is very 1980s, in that a lot of things don't have safety rails that probably should. Any time in later editions the writers went, "Well, that could be abused, let's write in some obvious limitations," AD&D didn't.