Retro Cycling Videogame Review: Pro Cycling (PC)

This article was published in October 2006, as entry number five on our Top Five Best Ever Videogames About Cycling series. In retrospect, it’s pretty awesome that the on-screen speed & energy display is framed within a bicycle computer, an innovation that hasn’t made its way to modern games apart from that one Grand Theft Auto mod.

#5 – Pro Cycling

The game that was so good they named a magazine after it. We’ve lost the back of the box it came in, but we’re sure it promised unparalleled realism and exciting gameplay. The only thing it really offered was a huge disappointment.

The cover is a bit misleading, you can’t actually ride a naff mountain bike down a 45 degree angle at any point in the game. You CAN participate in any of the 1996 editions of the three grand tours, or “manage” a team for the duration of a tour.

The riding part is fun and innovative. And by “fun” we mean “tiresome”. And by “innovative” we mean “pointless”. The bizarre control system is super fun to work out, since Midas Interactive Entertainment don’t seem to believe in using arrow keys OR providing manuals. Excitable gamers who installed the game and started up a Tour de France were soon met with the challenge of trying to take a corner immediately after the start of the prologue, only to watch their rider crash into a wall. Repeatedly.

The controls get easier once you realise that you control the rider’s speed only by adjusting the gears, and that you use G and H (or something similarly ludicrous) to turn. The gear system is a novel approach, flawed only by the fact that once you work out the best gearing for different terrains (it’ll take about ten minutes of play time), you can win any race by miles without consuming any of your rider’s energy. Ever wanted to see Chris Boardman win the Tour de France by three hours? Now you can.

We really shouldn’t have used up the word “pointless” on the racing bit of the game. The management section is so utterly flawed that anybody caught playing it should be whipped with a rusty bike chain until they understand what they’ve done wrong. Rather than allowing you to interact with the race directly, you drag little icons onto a profile of the stage prior to it beginning. These icons mean things like “attack” and “eat”. And you have to do it for every rider on your team. You run the risk of making your rider attack out of the peloton whilst a breakway group of 15 riders has a 20 minute lead, but that’s cycle race tactics for you. The most exciting feature is the “counter attack” command, which works about as well as you’d expect of something that demands you make a blind guess as to the exact position over a 200 kilometre course that someone else might attack.

There’s also the fact that you can’t use Miguel Indurain, even though he had won five consecutive Tours de France and was gunning for a sixth when this game came out. And all the other riders’ statistics are so outrageously wrong that your prior cycling knowledge will be worthless. Pantani who? Abraham Olano is where it’s at.

Conclusion
Never play this game. Ever.

If we ever remember to do the next game on the list…
…we’ll be looking at Super Tour 3! (Don’t worry, we’ll get to Pro Cycling Manager one day.)