Probably still my favorite game of all time.
You may talk about Grand Theft Auto letting you do anything, roam around stealing and killing and hanging out with prostitutes, well Wasteland did it all before.
The premise was this was after WWIII and the Russians somehow missed Las Vegas with their nukes. So you are in a large area stretching from East California to maybe East Nevada. Areas of land are radioactive and dangerous mutants are everywhere. Best of all, most people have a sly and cynical attitude, and the flavor text is very amusing.
You (and your team) are members of the Desert Rangers who are trying to bring order and stability back to this remnant of civilization. Luckily they don't force you to be good. One of the most memorable sequences is in the very first town, a little farming community being overrun by mutant rodents. If you chose you can do all the mini-quests and save them, rescue the missing kid, fix the pump for their well, etc, but you could also choose to kill everyone in town. If you did that, some kids would spawn. If you kept killing the kids, the 'Fat Kid' would spawn saying 'I don't like you guys'. If you killed him, the Red Ranger would spawn and take his revenge on you. So there were consequences to being bad if you went far enough, but in general you could do what you want.
Other things you could do include: Firing a howitzer at a town, eating Hobo Dogs (guess what the main ingedient was!), sleeping with a mutant prostitute and catching a STD, gambling, drinking and many other cool things. The combat was text driven- as in 'You hit the Death Claw for 10 points of damage, exploding him like blood sausage'. Maybe the graphics didn't show much but I loved using all the weapons just to see what kind of criticals and damage messages you could get.
This was also the first game I encountered to give XP for using skills, and the skill system was big and well implemented, surprising for such an early game. It was also a game where you could recruit NPCs if you played your cards right, including a robot.
Overall this game played great, was fun to play and to read, and had a lot of area to explore. The graphics were kinda weak and the sound was pretty much non-existant (this is Apple II) but you hardly needed it. The sly humor and well written text more than made up for this loss.
This may have been the finest game ever made for the Apple II and one of the best RPGs of all time.