Prehistoric Isle 2 - SNK Neo Geo [005] PlayThru

Well, almost everything for a retro review exists for this game (along with Ninja Masters), except for the review itself.  I honestly do not know what happened to it.  Oh well, time to do a new writeup!

NOTE: A trainer was used for making this capture.

First, lets give the vitals of this arcade exclusive Neo Geo release -

US Title: Prehistoric Isle 2
Japanese Title: Prehistoric Isle 2
By:         Yumekobo
Size:         478 Megs
Home Release? No
MVS Release? 09/27/1999
CD Release? No

"Prehistoric Isle 2" is a beautifully drawn horizontal side-scrolling shooter for 1 or 2 players.  It is the sequel to the SNK original "Prehistoric Isle in 1930" released to arcades in 1989.

Yumekobo was also responsible for making Blazing Star on the Neo Geo, which is another shooter, and they do not disappoint with this game either.

The player has a choice between one of two helicopters, with the difference being the type of firepower utilized.  I do not believe either choice has an advantage, but your mileage may vary.

Each stage the player battles through armies of beautifully drawn dinosaur enemies.  Along the way, the player can rescue people who then hang off the helicopter (and run on the ground when the player skirts the surface), and the player also defends a pack of people being picked up by a rescue chopper.  At the end of each stage, a chopper comes in to collect any people the player has rescued before moving onto a final boss fight.

One item that makes this game unique is that the gameplay is a little different when the region is set to US (as shown in the gameplay here) versus Japanese.  For US play, a player is given a number of lives per credit, where one hit is one death.  For the Japanese region setting, the player is given a life bar, and once that is exhausted, game over for the player.  One benefit to the Japanese setting is that life power ups will appear while playing to help refill health.

I also really like the various 3D effects that the programmers used.  And the performance of the game is really nice, with very little slowdown on the Neo Geo when there is a lot of screen action happening!

I definitely recommend this title.  It is fun, and it looks really good!

Also, this is one of SNK's encrypted titles, so converting the game from MVS to AES (not done as much now as it was a decade ago due to increased availability of various cartridge adapters and flash cartridges) is expensive.

Capture Info:

This gameplay was captured on January 10, 2019.

Game was played on a modded SNK Neo Geo home console, equipped with the UniBIOS.
A HD Retrovision Component cable was used, connected to an OSSC 1.6 (processing the video in Line4x mode), with the output being captured by a Startech USB3HDCAP.

Video was edited with Shotcut.