Title screen of a 200-in-1 variant.
Family Sport refers to a series of 16-bit plug & play and handheld multi-game software containing a specific compilation of games. Multiple revisions of the software are known to exist with game counts ranging from 41 to 220. They were first released around 2008 on Wii clones, although they became more widespread in the mid-2010s when the software started being released on various generic portable devices. The software and games made for them were produced by Shenzhen Senca Technology Co., Ltd, initially for Sunplus SPG2xx hardware and later for GPL162xx hardware. As of writing, many systems carrying the Family Sport software are still sold to this day on sites such as Amazon.
Overview[]
The software seen on these consoles have one menu which acts as the main menu and mainly has sports games. This menu has another submenu for smaller scale games (referred to as Minigames) and another menu for educational titles. The former also has another menu which categorizes each game by genre. The Family Sport series notably features a roster of mascot characters on the title screen, menu, and in several of the games.
Games[]
"Main" games[]
These games appear on the first menu seen on all systems. Many of them are sports games meant for older systems, which were direct Wii clones. Most of these games allow the player to choose which character they want to play as or the difficulty.
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Bowling
- Boxing
- City Battle - A generic shoot-em-up with a power system very similar to Gradius.
- Crazy Moto - A motorbike racing game with a kicking mechanic.
- Curling
- Darts
- Fencing
- Fishing
- Golf
- Ice Hockey
- Mini Fighter - A direct port of Capcom's Pocket Fighter mostly retaining the same graphics as the original. Only Ken, Ryu, Sakura, Felicia, and Chun-Li are in this port. Each of them are (poorly) modified to be more distinct.
- Racing - A basic Mario Kart clone
- Run - A basic 100m dash game.
- Swim
- Table Tennis
- Tennis
- Trampoline - A game where the player must use a trampoline to bounce the highest they can.
Other games[]
Due to the very basic (and in some cases, very confusing) nature of the majority of these games, only the more notable titles are listed here.
- Airborne Alien - The player falls out of a UFO, and must reach the castle at the bottom of the screen. Level 2 features giant, off-coloured brick formations of Mario and a Goomba, based on their sprites from the original Super Mario Bros. game.
- Balloon Archer - Clone of Bloons.
- Balloon Boy - Seemingly based on Bird Knight from the Sport Vii, which in itself is based on Nintendo's Balloon Kid/Hello Kitty World. One of the enemies is the protagonist of Nice Code's Bug Catcher.
- Beach Volleyball - Volleyball game featuring animals. Unlike the aforementioned sport games, it uses a side perspective.
- Bomb Chain Unlimited - Clone of the Flash game of the same name.
- Bubble Destroyer - Clone of Pang!.
- Build Road - Clone of Gussun Oyoyo.
- Castle Smasher - Similar to Angry Birds, but not a direct clone.
- Eat Bean - Based on Pac-Man (and its name is a poor translation of Pac-Man from Chinese to English), but not a direct clone.
- Frogger - Clone of the Konami arcade game of the same name.
- Gold Miner - Clone of the Flash game of the same name, with very similar graphics.
- Greedy Girl - A Snake game.
- Hare Fighter - A simplified take on Bubble Bobble. The main character is a recolored version of Don from Don't Pull (from the arcade multigame Three Wonders), and one of the enemies is Waddle Doo from the Kirby series.
- Hell Marksman - Clone of Twin Shot.
- Icecream - Clone of Tapper.
- Jumping Ball - Blocks are rapidly falling from the top of the screen. The player must get as high as possible without being crushed by the blocks.
- Jumping Boy - Basic platformer featuring the same protagonist as Balloon Boy. Level 2 uses graphics of Lakitu's cloud from New Super Mario Bros.
- Jumping Eggs - Clone of The Amazing Dare-Dozen.
- Jumping Mary - Clone of Q*bert. One of the enemies appears to be a modified New Super Mario Bros. mushroom.
- Mi Fiit, Mi Guitar, Mi Papacon - All the same Guitar Hero clone, with slightly altered title screens. Inexplicably, they all exclusively appear on one 85-in-1 console, despite being completely identical.
- Mine - Clone of Minesweeper.
- Open Gold Box - An entirely luck-based game where the player opens treasure chests, trying to earn as much money as possible. All four players are different colored Pebbles from The Flintstones.
- Panda Labyrinth - Similar to Soukoban, but not a direct clone.
- Pass Maze Road - Guide the bubble through the maze while avoiding falling into holes.
- Pinball - A pinball game with an isometric perspective.
- Puzzle Ball - The player must build a ramp out of a selection of pieces in order to make the ball land in the hole.
- Rescue Pets - Clone of the "Leaf Bounce" level in the Flash game Hamtaro's Day Out. Hamtaro himself is removed, but several other Hamtaro characters remain (Bijou, Boss, Cappy, Dexter, Maxwell, Penelope, and Sandy/Stan).
- Seize Jewelry - Clone of Donkey Kong. The playable character appears to be a modified version of Link from the Zelda series (which is most evident by his shield). The game is very ‘notorious’ for the playable characters hitbox being a bit large for the barrels, which lead to the game being sometimes unfair.
- Star War - An action game (completely unrelated to Star Wars) where a flying robot must attack various objects in space.
- West Cowboy - A reflex game where the player controls a cowboy fighting in standoffs against one or more characters. The goal of each level is to shoot the opponent and/or dodge the opponent's shots in time. The game infamously features Osama Bin Laden with a rocket launcher as the final unique opponent, with subsequent levels featuring multiple characters from previous levels. If the player is shot, then the game is immediately over and the player is taken back to the Family Sport menu.
- Numerous basic educational programs. They are almost all identical to each other in "gameplay", and are seemingly included solely to inflate the game count. They likely originated from a separate, solely educational plug & play series, and were then merged with the Family Sport series later on. One of the educational games has an incorrect word for Skateboard, which is listed as Scooter.
Consoles[]
- 41-in-1 (Zone 32-bit Gaming Console System)
- 85-in-1 (Eittek Miwi Game Console, My Wico Deluxe)
- 100-in-1 (OPlayer)
- 105-in-1 (Arcada Mega Drive Portable)
- 120-in-1 (I'm Game! Handheld Player)
- 200-in-1 (Denver GMP-270CMK2, Hyper Gamer 3.0, GBD Kids Retro Arcade Cabinet)
- 202-in-1 (Millennium Arcade)
- 220-in-1 (My Arcade Go Gamer Portable, Gamer X Portable, Gamer Max)
Cloned game sets[]
The Family Sport series (including both its games and branding) would be cloned by a few companies unaffiliated with Senca for their own multi-game offerings. It is unknown if these additional game sets were authorized by Senca.
JungleTac[]
Title screen of the Zone 60, a system by JungleTac that prominently imitates the Family Sport series.
JungleTac would create a few multi-game sets prominently featuring interpretations of the Family Sport mascots and games featuring said mascot characters. Consoles known to feature these multi-game sets include the Zone 60, Wireless 60, Zone 100, and Wireless 100. While the mascot character games on all known consoles carrying these game sets feature option menus directly modeled after the ones in the Family Sport sports games, the Zone 60 and Zone 100 are more blatant in their copying of the Family Sport series. Not only do both consoles feature boot screens that directly mimic the earlier (2008-era) Family Sport title screen and home menus closely modeled after one used in some Family Sport revisions, the versions of three of the mascot games included on the consoles are also directly modeled after their corresponding Family Sport counterparts to the extent that they repurpose graphical elements from the Family Sport games. In particular, the tennis and boxing games on the Zone 60 and 100 feature backgrounds with elements directly screen captured from the respective Family Sport counterparts, and the background in the table tennis game is at least directly redrawn from the background in the equivalent Family Sport game.
JungleTac's Family Sport-derived game sets are not known to have been released prior to 2010, with many of the consoles carrying these game sets having been released by that year. While the specific game sets prominently featuring the Family Sport mascot derivatives are not known to have been released on further consoles, game sets using generic versions of the Zone 60/Zone 100 game menus and carrying the mascot games would be released on some consoles in the 2010s, including the JG7410 and JG7415 consoles in Lexibook's TV Game Console line.
Multi-Content Software[]
Several seemingly-unauthorized ports of the Family Sport games for Sunplus SPG2xx hardware were produced by Shenzhen Multi-Content Software Co., Ltd, seen on consoles such as the "Millennium Arcade 250". Bizarrely, most of the visuals in Multi-Content Software's Senca ports appear to be poorly recorded off of a television (presumably from a genuine Family Sport console), with visible interference in the graphics.
Trivia[]
- Individual Android ports of many Family Sport series games were released on the Google Play Store in the mid-2010s.[1][2] It is currently unknown if these releases use emulation or are recoded from scratch; though notably, the Android ports' music and sound effects use separate .wav samples. The games are run in a stretched 16:9 aspect ratio.
Gallery[]
