Want to make sure that Pro Cycling Manager 2013 is worth playing once it's released in June? Well, here's your chance to get some influence on this.

Cyanide is looking for beta testers who'd be willing to give feedback on the upcoming game's multiplayer mode, 3D races and career mode.

The beta testing will run from 2nd to 30th of April, and speaking from experience, it's simply about playing PCM as much as possible and report your 'sightings' (and bugs) in the best possible manner. If you're not happy with e.g. the AI, this is probably the best chance you can get to give feedback and get listened to by the ones who can actually change it.

For more information on how to apply, check this thread out.

With just three months left to the release of Pro Cycling Manager 2013, it's about time that the first news about the game start to surface.

And luckily for us, they just did. PCMFrance (link in French) has interviewed Cyanide's Clément Pinget about the upcoming game, and below you'll find the main conclusions.

Gameplay
This seems to be the theme of the year. First of all, it appears we'll see a new graph/bar in PCM13 which indicates the riders' freshness and recovery between stages. If you've been in a 200 km long attack two days after each other, the energy bars will be reduced on the next stage.

The much critiicized accelleration stat has finally been 'fixed', so there's now a difference between an explosive rider and a diesel engine (Contador and Basso, for example). This stat will also affect the strategies and tactics used by riders and teams.

It also seems that the AI will be more aggressive in stages where the human player does not take control/initiative.

Cyanide also also planned to make cobblestones more difficult.

Career
For those of you who have been playing PCM for years, you may remember a time when riders were asking to race in specific races. Well, it seems it's returning in some form. Riders will be asking for certain races and goals throughout the season, and following(not following these will havesome sort of impact  (rewards and penalties are mentioned in the interview).

The race planner that was added in PCM12 has been developed further, so it's now possible to group riders into e.g. Ardennes, Tour de France etc.

It is also planned to add more interactions with the sponsor (in terms of goals, possible budget increase), but this hasn't been added to the game so far.

Graphics
I may have overlooked this piece of news, but it appears there's a new shirt format coming. It's the same as the previous one, except now doubled in size (910x626) to make it HD. This also means that PCM13 jerseys will be compatible with PCM12 - you'll just have to reduce it in size.

As a minor detail to this shirt change, it sounds like PCM will now use .png files rather than .tga.

There's a bunch of new animations to look out for in PCM13, as (maybe?) discovered by lluuiiggii a while ago.

In terms of the stage editor, there's two new graphic kits for stages (Corsica being one of them), more houses/homes, new objects for creating beautiful sea shores and the possibility to play with HD textures.

Graphic Interface
With the new rider control panel, people on higher resolutions claimed it was too small. It will be possible in PCM13 to increase the size of the rider panels.

It will be possible to open a map of a stage to make it easier to foresee changes in wind direction, for example.

Multiplayer
Two new multiplayer modes, according to Cyanide. However, don't get too excited. One of them is in the integration of track racing in Armada. The other is a new tour mode which allows you to create stage races (as friendlies, won't count towards the Armada ranking.

The Velogames Fantasy Cycling season will start with Milan San Remo. 11 classics from Milan San Remo over the Flanders Classics to the Ardennes will be in this series. You can pick a team of 12 riders for 100 points. In between the classics you can make up to 24 transfers in total. So picking the right riders is as important as making the right transfers.

There will be a PCM Daily Fantasy League. To join, you need the following code: 14101347.

More information in the thread.

It's at that time of the year where the first information of Cyanide's next renditions of its cycling games start to surface.

The French part of Amazon seem to have got hold of the official cover art of both Pro Cycling Manager 2013 and the console game Tour de France 2013.

There's not really any product info except for two release dates which are set to be June 21nd for Pro Cycling Manager 2013 and June 28th for Tour de France 2013.

But hey, we got to start somewhere. And I can guarantee that we will know much more when this month is over.

(Thanks to Rin for the tip)

Both the Update and the All in One package have been released, and it's now safe to say that PCM.daily's 2013 DB is out in the open field.

While we did expect some interest, I have to say that I didn't expect more than 2.000 downloads in less than 24 hours - and neither did the poor servers which haven't been able to serve all of you.

Therefore, we've now decided to go back to the usual way of distributing. And to clear everything up, here's some recommendations on what to do:

If you don't have any of the previos PCM.daily databases, go for the All in One Package.

If you do, go for the Update Package, but make sure that you have every file mentioned in the installation description.

Both will download as torrents. When released, torrents are usually quite slow since there's only few seeders (people who have downloaded the entire package). It will get better speed-wise within a day or so.

As an alternative to the torrents, you can download the files by the mirrors which you will find in the download description at each of the two links. However, in this case you will have to download between 3 and 10 smaller files of about 1 GB. Despite the hassle, this may be the faster option to begin with.

We kindly ask you to seed the files even if you choose to download through the mirrors. This is how:
1. Download the files from the mirrors and place them in the same folder.
2. When done downloading, download the torrent file and open it with uTorrent.
3. uTorrent will ask you where you want to download the file to. Point it to the folder where you stored the files from the mirror.
4. It will now check whether the files matches the ones it wants to download. When done, it will start seeding (and not re-download). and you will be helping others getting the files faster.