It doesn't make sense, but I wasn't ready to let go - CrueTrue (Apparantely now married to his old Cycling Manager collection)

All things Vuelta

The Vuelta a Espana is now less than a week away with plenty of discussion on the pre-race thread in anticipation of a race with an increasingly strong looking field. As mentioned this morning, our Velogames fantasy game league is now up and running, with the passcode 17094554.

As the real Vuelta approaches, over in the ManGame the Vuelta is drawing to an end after a route with a lot of time trial kilometres, but plenty of climbs as well. And while the time trials do see gaps, the mountains have been where the race is more easily lost - two race leaders (Taylor Phinney and former champion Justo Tenorio) lost their top position by failing to follow the moves of their rivals. Taking control in their place was Aleksandr Pluchkin of Metinvest, who is now so close to a first GT victory after coming so close on numerous occasions. Just two stages remains: a summit finish up the Angliru, and a final long time trial.

Everyone wants to Be a Pro

The Pro Cyclist mode was a new addition to PCM this year, and it is proving to be a popular area of discussion, with the General thread now closing in on 50 pages in length. One recent area of discussion is about how it is possible to create a balanced statistic, and in case you missed it, tazzy4u2's post from a couple of weeks ago provides a very useful guide to the stat limits that the game tends to give you. You'll need to use the PCM Fast Editor if you want to get around that!

Also catching the eye this week has been the Be a Pro Stories thread with some great 'wall of text' posts from Shonak and moldef, documenting the careers of Igor Vizcaya and Steffen Moldef respectively. They are certainly worth the read, and it would be great to see more games being regularly documented there! The largest PCM15 Story is also in the Be a Pro format, as zuff is now into the 4th season with Franck Signori using his 1980s DB, with a distinctive image reporting style. To neatly tie our themes together, Signori has been competing in the Vuelta this week, and performed very well!

Console game patch

The largest thread in our Tour de France 2015 console forum asks if anybody is buying a game. Well, if anyone did, then Cyanide have within the last half an hour released a patch for the game. This includes an updated database, bug fixes, and a reduced difficulty for mountain stages.

Bad week for Garmin - Cannondale

Talansky might get on a GT podium if his form is good (Tafiolmo)

Yeah maybe if he's given a 30 minutes headstart. (Spilak23)

Dan Martin at Etixx?I don't like him and don't want him at Etixx. (The Schleck Fan)

Now I don't like the whole Etixx squad anymore :/ (Paul23)

I hope he crashes just as much as he did with Garmin (baseballlover312)

Thread of the Week

Transfer Season 15/16. As quoted above, this thread gave a fascinating insight into the inner workings of a cycling fanboy.

And one to watch: Team Aegon. User-rider stories don't have the greatest record of longevity, but Selwink is back with a new attempt for PCM15, after the success of his Projob-Odfjell story in PCM13.