 The first mountain stage of this year's Tour de France will undoubtely show who's here to win and who's not. There's still a few hours until the action begins, though, so in the meanwhile, enjoy this week's Weekly News.
Vive la France - win a trip
As you all know, a Track Ladder has been introduced with PCM09. And now that the game has been released (in DVD version) in all/most of the planned countries, it's now being reset. This also allows Cyanide to arrange its first PCM09 Track Competition.
Basically, the 5 best players in the period from July the 10th until July the 20th (15:00 CET) in Omnium will be rewarded with a price. If you're French and end 1st, you'll be given an invitation to attend the finish of the Tour de France at the Champs Elysses. If you're not French and win anyway, you'll be given the 2nd prize which is a full Tour de France pack with a bag, tee, cap and gourd, whatever that is ;)
For the full details, read Cyanide's info on the event.
Last patch for PCM09?
So far, two patches have been released for PCM09 - and it seems possible that yesterday's release was the last one. The official beta forums have been closed, indicating that the testing has ended - and usually, that means that there's no more to test.
That said, if major problems or annoyances do show up, a patch will come eventually.
Update: The beta forum has now been reopened.
PPDB releases 1st DB for PCM09
PPDB has been using a lot of time on Pro Cycling Manager 2006 and never really moved to neither PCM07 nor PCM08. Now it appears that they're finally going to make the move to a newer edition, PCM09. A 1st quick DB has been released, based on PCM.daily's Expansion Pack, but with PPDB's names and stat matrix. Have a look at it here.
Major DB to be released soon
Some of you may remember that the French DB team Cya DB released their huge DB for PCM08 few weeks before the release of PCM09. However, as with the PCM.daily DB, it was 'hit' by the so-called March bug, thus making it not making it fully playable.
Luckily, they're now converting the DB to PCM09, so all their work isn't wasted. And the tests so far seem to show that the March bug isn't present in PCM09. Also, it's been going forward pretty quickly, and they expect to be able to release it on July the 14th.
Update on PCM.daily's DB
The work on PCM.daily's 2009 DB for PCM09 is coming along fine. We could quite easily have converted the DB for PCM08 and released it now, but we've decided to take a different approach this time. The list of teams were announced a week ago, including more European teams than the original DB, and we're now including more European races to complement this new approach.
Furthermore - and this is what we've used most of the time on - we've decided to completely start over with the list of free agents. The PCM08 DB's free agents were based on the PlusPackage which was based on an even older DB. This meant that many of the riders in the had actualy retired, been suspended for doping, etc.
So, instead, we've been compiling an entirely new list with lots of young, talented upcoming riders - of course mixed with the old, experienced riders who are still doing good (e.g. Jaan Kirsipuu ;)).
We still don't have any release date, but we'll let you know whenever we know.
Change has come to ... PCM
'Change' is a word used a lot these days. Cyanide didn't quite live up to this as PCM09 pretty much looks equal to its predecessor, PCM08. Luckily, there's some creative souls out there with dj-cycloteck being one of them. He's made a new dark-blue interface for PCM09, and although it's a matter of taste, I think it's worth checking out ;)
You can see some screenshots of it here or go straight to the download. |
