Yosaku GM
A downloadable game for Windows
It's another day of work for Yosaku the woodcutter, chopping down conifers in the mountains of Japan. But on this particular day, the local wildlife is fighting back! Determined as always, Yosaku won't let any snake, bird, or wild boar get in the way of his work... as long as you, the player, can help him navigate the dangers.
In 1979, Shin Nihon Kikaku (later known as SNK) published the arcade game Yosaku, though it was likely developed by Orca, which you may know as a predecessor to Toaplan. The game draws its concept from the 1978 enka song by Saburō Kitajima, which was quite popular in Japan for a time and inspired several video games. The most successful of these was Kikori no Yosaku for the Epoch Cassette Vision, which features similar gameplay to the Orca/SNK original.
Today, only a handful of Yosaku arcade machines are known to exist, and no ROM dump is publicly available for play in MAME or similar emulators. Due to the lack of a dump, I've taken it upon myself to recreate the game using Game Maker 8.2, maintaining authenticity through careful analysis of gameplay footage uploaded to YouTube by the user "higenekodo." The video doesn't show every feature, so I stayed faithful to what was shown while making educated guesses for the rest, drawing on cabinet photos and magazine articles as reference. It's not 100% perfect, but it should feel very close to the original SNK/Orca experience. If anyone has deeper knowledge of the real game and spots any inaccuracies in my remake, please feel free to reach out!
- CONTROLS -
Keyboard:
Left arrow key - move left
Right arrow key - move right
Z - swing axe
5 or 6 - insert coin
1 - start a 1-player game
2 - start a 2-player game
P - pause
Controller:
Left on D-pad or left analog stick - move left
Right on D-pad or left analog stick - move right
Any face button (0-3) - swing axe
Back (8) or L/R trigger (6 or 7) - insert coin
Start (9) or L button (4) - start a 1-player game
R button (5) - start a 2-player game
- GAMEPLAY TIPS -
Falling branches will only cost Yosaku a life if they hit his head, so you can harmlessly move into them from the side to make them disappear. This applies to bird droppings as well, but they will not cause Yosaku to lose a life, they will only freeze him in place for about half a second.
The boar is hard to hit, but if there are trees in play, you can move behind them to become immune to its charge. There are also certain tricks you can use to position yourself in a prime boar-striking spot... can you find them?
If you stay in one spot for too long, an extremely fast snake will appear directly under you, so stay on the move!
Download
Install instructions
Just extract the .zip archive and run Yosaku.exe.
Comments
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Could use a bit of work. IDK if these were in the arcade original, but these are just personal nitpicks of mine.
Firstly I think the hit detection on the branches is too sensitive, as there were times where I died despite not touching the branches.
Secondly, I wish you didn't have to be super accurate to hit the trees. There were times where I was just slightly too far or slightly too close, and therefore I wasn't able to hit the trees.
Thirdly, there were times where I walked into branches from the side and died anyway.
Fourthly, there were times where the boar spawned right on top of me or way too close for me to react.
I understand that some of the aspects of the gameplay are confusing or hard to deal with, but I'm pretty sure most of these are accurate to the arcade original.
As for the branch hit detetcion, you kind of just have to get a feel for where it's going to hit you (if there's one pixel of space between Yosaku and a branch, you're probably safe). The tree hitting position is also accurate, and was never an issue for me, then again I got used to it, and think it adds to the challenge. As for the boar, it's worth keeping in mind that it will always appear about four seconds after you completely chop down a tree, so after you do so, try to avoid hanging out on the right side of the screen so you can more easily avoid or hit it. For dying when walking into branches from the side, they probably still hit the top 8 pixels of Yosaku's sprite. It doesn't work no matter what, only if they visibly don't hit his head.
The amount of attention to detail and meticulous reference that went into this work from just the few bits of media that exist about this game is truly astonishing. It's like perfect.
ayyyy thanks man