14 DAY TRIAL // At the moment, a peloton of more than 180 cyclists is moving through France, taking part in one of the biggest sporting events in the world, Le Tour de France, a three-week-long contest that tests a variety of skills and ends on Le Champs Elysees.
This is the most important of the three Grand Tours that define the calendar of professional cyclists and fans of the sport, and I am such a big devotee of the race that I plan to take the next week off in order to be able to watch the most important stages without any sort of interference.
While watching TV I will also be running Pro Cycling Manager 2014, the simulation title created by Cyanide and published by Focus Home Interactive, which aims to deliver an accurate take on the sport and allow players to select their favorite team and lead it to glory.
Not Too Much Reality, Please
Le Tour de France is an impressive race, with a course that includes 21 full stages, one time trial, several mountain finishes and plenty of high-profile cyclists, including Alberto Contador, Nairo Quintana, Chris Froome, and Bauke Mollema.
The virtual race in PCM 2014 can be tweaked to include almost any rider the gamer wants to use, and the various stages are based on their real-life counterparts, although the fan community is also known for producing its own variants in time so that it can add some diversity to the experience.
The big problem with reality is that it leaves limited space for fantasy.
I know that Frank Schleck, the leader of my favorite Trek Factory Racing, needs an actual miracle in order to win Le Tour de France as I will be watching it on television.
Even in PCM 2014 the feat is hard to achieve, but as long as I play my cards right and manage to guide his season appropriately, I have a better chance to achieve the feat.
So on the one hand, when it comes to cycling, just as in other sports titles, gamers tend to prefer the developers to deliver solid simulations with as accurate as possible mechanics and stats, but on the other, they don’t want them to be so close to the real world that they make fantasy fulfilment impossible.
In some ways, titles like PCM 2014 or FIFA 14 can annoy some fans because they make it hard for low level teams, no matter how well controlled, to defeat the giants of the sport.
Mechanics Are More Important than Stats
The development team at Cyanide has made the smart move of focusing on trying to replicate the core mechanics of cycling rather than using a lot of scouts to watch and then approximate the exact stats of each rider in the professional peloton.
Fans of Pro Cycling Manager 2014 tend to criticize the company for the fact that extensive work from the community is needed to deliver more accurate versions for the majority of riders.
But Cyanide, with its limited resources, understands that it’s important to have a solid way of implementing the impact of race form in PCM 2014 and less than essential to decide whether Fabian Cancellara, to take one random example, has a rating of 81 or 82 in time trial.
The big sports, from football to basketball and hockey, have big video game franchises with plenty of resources to devote to both mechanics and stats.
Cycling cannot marshal as many developers, and that means solid mechanics are the priority and fans can then focus on the realism of the Pro Cycling Manager 2014 experience.