I was an Amiga gamer, I played Shadow of the Beast 2, I remember the graphics and audio fondly but I don't ever remember thinking it was a great game. The situation was similar for Shadow of the Beast, was an interesting setting but the gameplay never appealed.
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).
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).