Top five best ever videogames about cycling: Tour de France
Published by Halverde on 11/14/2006 at 16:41.
#3 - Tour de France (PS2/Xbox)
Do you remember when Tour de France came out? When it set the world alight? No, we don't either. The first we heard of it was a mention of it in a friend's magazine, and we knew we had to play it. Apparently games shops work on a weird reverse supply-demand logic that suggests that if nobody wants the product then the price has to be raised. But we finally got our hands on the Xbox version, so it was worth remortaging the house for.
If one thing is becoming increasingly apparent from reviewing these games, it's that the box art is always grossly misleading. In Tour de France's case, the box depicts Mapei riding a team time trial, despite the fact that the game features zero (0) team time trials, zero (0) individual time trials, and zero (0) examples of riders actually working as a team.
Its greatest act of deception, however, is that it also doesn't feature a Tour de France. At least, not a proper one. Instead, you get a Tour de France "mode" -- an alarming Japanese take on the Tour, as you create and then take control of a new rider with the intention of winning the Tour de France at the end of a five year period. To do this, you race and train all year round, then enter the six stage Tour in July. Unlike other games which, you know, let you revel in your success, the game ends after the five years of hard training are up, whether you've won the Tour or not. Only the Japanese could create a game that is all about working hard, and ends before your effort is transformed into achievement.
But playing the Tour de France mode isn't all futile. After your five years are up, you unlock real life racers based on the teams that your character rode for during his career. These eight racers are: Beloki, Botero, Etxebarria, Mancebo, Millar, Moreau, Vainsteins and Verbrugghe -- without doing any research into the matter, we reckon that at least six of these riders have been implicated (or worse) in doping cases at some point. And the game manual gives special thanks to Manolo Saiz. Woops.
The game's controls are intuitive and easy to learn (even if it is to the detriment of the manual). Holding the A button causes your rider to pedal, tapping it repeatedly causes him to sprint/attack. Y lets your rider drink water, and X brakes. Simple.
Sadly, the basic game mechanics prevent you from ever exploring the inviting control scheme. Rather than starting as a peleton, the race's competitors are spread across the route in groups of seven. And you're always in the last group. Chasing down the leaders every time you play becomes a major chore, especially when you're trying to compete for the overall in the Tour, and leads to you constantly hammering the sprint button to blast past the slower moving groups. You'll come to miss the tactical ingenuity of Pro Cycling Manager by the time you've completed your second race.
On top of this, the whole game is riddled with bugs. We bought it whilst the 2003 Tour de France was going on in real life, and were shocked to see our rider fall of his bike for no reason on a descent and crash out of the Tour. Needless to say, the bug happened every time and led to us amusing our friends by selecting Beloki and reproducing his famous crash. Even more annoyingly, the Ventoux stage sometimes drops you through the floor and out of the race just as you come up to the finish line. Anybody who's ever ridden up the Ventoux will understanding just how frightening a prospect it is to see your suffering go to waste in a such a way. And did we mention that when you crash out of a race, your rider sits on the floor whilst his horizontal bicycle bounces increasingly higher in front of him? Or that you can sometimes sit in the wind shadow of riders you can barely even see on the horizon? Or that you have to train your rider so that he can turn when he encounters a corner?
The game's saving grace comes in the form of its two player mode -- a two-up race to the end of a chosen stage. Rather than just a straight race, however, the developers added a points system, with the winner being the rider who picks up the most points on the road. With bonuses at the finish and at intermediate sprints, but also points allocated for the length of time your character spends leading the other rider, there's a lot to think about. If you sit on for the whole race and only sprint at the checkpoints and finish, your friend will pick up the bonus points for dragging you along and win the race. Conversely, if you do too much work then you'll find yourself unable to compete in the sprints and lose the race that way. For such a simple system, it's alarmingly tactical.
Conclusion
Buy it on eBay for a few quid, then crack the same joke we did as you demonstrate how you can make Beloki fall off in the middle of the road and injure himself.
Tomorrow
Another thing we wrote ages ago in anticipation of the winter lull.
Do you remember when Tour de France came out? When it set the world alight? No, we don't either. The first we heard of it was a mention of it in a friend's magazine, and we knew we had to play it. Apparently games shops work on a weird reverse supply-demand logic that suggests that if nobody wants the product then the price has to be raised. But we finally got our hands on the Xbox version, so it was worth remortaging the house for.
If one thing is becoming increasingly apparent from reviewing these games, it's that the box art is always grossly misleading. In Tour de France's case, the box depicts Mapei riding a team time trial, despite the fact that the game features zero (0) team time trials, zero (0) individual time trials, and zero (0) examples of riders actually working as a team.
Its greatest act of deception, however, is that it also doesn't feature a Tour de France. At least, not a proper one. Instead, you get a Tour de France "mode" -- an alarming Japanese take on the Tour, as you create and then take control of a new rider with the intention of winning the Tour de France at the end of a five year period. To do this, you race and train all year round, then enter the six stage Tour in July. Unlike other games which, you know, let you revel in your success, the game ends after the five years of hard training are up, whether you've won the Tour or not. Only the Japanese could create a game that is all about working hard, and ends before your effort is transformed into achievement.
But playing the Tour de France mode isn't all futile. After your five years are up, you unlock real life racers based on the teams that your character rode for during his career. These eight racers are: Beloki, Botero, Etxebarria, Mancebo, Millar, Moreau, Vainsteins and Verbrugghe -- without doing any research into the matter, we reckon that at least six of these riders have been implicated (or worse) in doping cases at some point. And the game manual gives special thanks to Manolo Saiz. Woops.
The game's controls are intuitive and easy to learn (even if it is to the detriment of the manual). Holding the A button causes your rider to pedal, tapping it repeatedly causes him to sprint/attack. Y lets your rider drink water, and X brakes. Simple.
Sadly, the basic game mechanics prevent you from ever exploring the inviting control scheme. Rather than starting as a peleton, the race's competitors are spread across the route in groups of seven. And you're always in the last group. Chasing down the leaders every time you play becomes a major chore, especially when you're trying to compete for the overall in the Tour, and leads to you constantly hammering the sprint button to blast past the slower moving groups. You'll come to miss the tactical ingenuity of Pro Cycling Manager by the time you've completed your second race.
On top of this, the whole game is riddled with bugs. We bought it whilst the 2003 Tour de France was going on in real life, and were shocked to see our rider fall of his bike for no reason on a descent and crash out of the Tour. Needless to say, the bug happened every time and led to us amusing our friends by selecting Beloki and reproducing his famous crash. Even more annoyingly, the Ventoux stage sometimes drops you through the floor and out of the race just as you come up to the finish line. Anybody who's ever ridden up the Ventoux will understanding just how frightening a prospect it is to see your suffering go to waste in a such a way. And did we mention that when you crash out of a race, your rider sits on the floor whilst his horizontal bicycle bounces increasingly higher in front of him? Or that you can sometimes sit in the wind shadow of riders you can barely even see on the horizon? Or that you have to train your rider so that he can turn when he encounters a corner?
The game's saving grace comes in the form of its two player mode -- a two-up race to the end of a chosen stage. Rather than just a straight race, however, the developers added a points system, with the winner being the rider who picks up the most points on the road. With bonuses at the finish and at intermediate sprints, but also points allocated for the length of time your character spends leading the other rider, there's a lot to think about. If you sit on for the whole race and only sprint at the checkpoints and finish, your friend will pick up the bonus points for dragging you along and win the race. Conversely, if you do too much work then you'll find yourself unable to compete in the sprints and lose the race that way. For such a simple system, it's alarmingly tactical.
Conclusion
Buy it on eBay for a few quid, then crack the same joke we did as you demonstrate how you can make Beloki fall off in the middle of the road and injure himself.
Tomorrow
Another thing we wrote ages ago in anticipation of the winter lull.
