14 DAY TRIAL // Il Giro is now on, the first week of racing taking the cyclists from the crash prone Holland stages to a team time trial in Italy and the peloton now preparing for the first mountains of the three-week tour.
While watching the stages play out on television, the gamer in me was compelled to take a look at the old back up drive and locate Cycling Manager 2009, the Cyanide made cycling simulation, which arrives like clockwork every year in the run up to the Tour de France. After a bit of patching and locating a nice 2010 database of riders and teams, I am now managing Saxo Bank and preparing to tackle the big spring classics with my virtual team.
Cycling simulation is a very small niche in videogaming and it's very nice to see a developer who is so dedicated to the experience and to the fans to keep pumping them out each year, adding new gameplay mechanics, ironing out bugs and updating team and rider stats. For those who are not yet ready to spend money to see how virtual cycling can capture the mind, there's always the option of trying the stripped down yet still engaging Cycling Manager Online, which is free to play.
When the pressure of setting up a spring train gets too much, I plan to take on Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Dawn. I feel kind of ashamed for not giving it more than a few hours when it first launched and hope to make sense of the new upgrade and unit unlock system that the game introduced. I am also pretty curious to see how the fate of the mysterious Kane shapes up. And when this kind of real time strategy fails to satisfy me, I will log into Neptune's Pride, the online free-to-play RTS.