Terrible Cycling Videogame Teases Its Latest Terrible Iteration

There will be a new Tour de France videogame in 2020.

Back in the early days of Derailed, we had to trawl ancient MS-DOS releases, weird Japanese NES ROMs about keirin racing, and a terrible PS2 Tour de France RPG that had a pretty baffling take on how to turn bike racing into a game. Oh, and Pro Cycling Manager 2004, which was actually pretty good apart from a bug that killed all your riders’ morale after a season and made it impossible to compete.

In 2020, we still have Pro Cycling Manager. If you last played it in 2004, then congrats, it’s going to be a huge improvement. If you last played it in 2019, then congrats, you can save $50 by not buying this year’s version. It’s alright.

There’s also the truly terrible Tour de France game. It glitches out and puts the landscape on top of the roads, so you’re riding through grassy hills and whatnot. It’s slow as shit. Mountain stages are impossible until you realize that the game doesn’t understand how to manage breakaways on them, and then they’re laughably easy.

Its redeeming feature is that it’s a game about this sport that isn’t basically just a spreadsheet. There’s some fun wish-fulfillment in there if you want to play the legend mode and make your own rider. I think they added a FUT-style mode too, but I don’t think anybody ever played it.

It’s terrible. But it’s ours, and we should support it or we might be back to playing DOS games again. So, good news! You can buy it again this year. The jerseys will look slightly different, and some of the bugs that would’ve been patched out by a real game developer are likely to be fixed in this year’s version. Plus there will be whole new bugs to enjoy!

Here’s the teaser.

Their official website gives a 404 error. Truly incredible stuff.