- Perihelion
- P.P. Hammer
- Blues Brothers
- Sensible Soccer
- Lemmings
- Alien Breed
- Another World
The Amiga had a wide variety of games, and certainly didn't cater only for people who wanted graphics over gameplay, but yes good graphics were celebrated. I think part of the reason for that was the whole 'ahead of its time' idea, that a computer released in 1985 with a handful of underwhelming updates could still stand its ground into the 90s. Amiga was certainly not alone with this, applied just as well to the Neo Geo, and the Japanese got lucky with the Sharp X68000 too.
Another part of this was the game magazine culture, hard to talk about how a game plays, but easy to show off how a game looks. Game demos were a much more complementary medium than magazines for showing off the strength of games (though I had a sizeable collection of game magazines at one point, I'm not completely against them).
But it was pure, frustrating, junk from a gameplay perspective. The controls were clunky and shit was always popping out of nowhere and killing you. I kept dying at the first "boss", a skeleton thing on a throne that looked like it was made of some bigger creature's jaw. What I didn't know at the time was that there was a gryphon I had to defeat by punching the crystal orb it was bouncing; defeating the gryphon would temporarily grant me the power to shoot hadoukens, and the skeleton thing was only vulnerable to the hadoukens. (If you used up your hadoukens before defeating the skeleton thing, well, sucks to be you.)
And it's just full of stuff like this. The game doesn't tell you ANYTHING about how to play it or what its goals are. Plus it was a pioneer in unskippable cutscenes: moving from one place to another -- like going in a door or something -- entailed staring at a still image while adventure-game-style flavor text scrolled by and no key or button press could dismiss it. And once you die, that's it. You have to start all the way from the beginning. The game could be cleared in half an hour -- IF you knew where everything was. I guess it got replay value by surprising you with deadly enemies and obstacles you couldn't see coming and making you start over each time a new thing bit you in the ass.
But we all remember Shadow of the Beast -- indeed Amiga users look back fondly at it -- SIMPLY BECAUSE OF ITS GRAPHICS AND SOUND.
Sword of Sodan was the same thing: clunky and repetitive, but WOW LOOK AT THOSE HUGE SPRITES.
So yes, "good graphics = good game" is a thing, and it's because of the market, not because of the execs.