It doesn't make sense, but I wasn't ready to let go - CrueTrue (Apparantely now married to his old Cycling Manager collection)

All things Vuelta

The Vuelta a Espana is now less than a week away with plenty of discussion on the pre-race thread in anticipation of a race with an increasingly strong looking field. As mentioned this morning, our Velogames fantasy game league is now up and running, with the passcode 17094554.

As the real Vuelta approaches, over in the ManGame the Vuelta is drawing to an end after a route with a lot of time trial kilometres, but plenty of climbs as well. And while the time trials do see gaps, the mountains have been where the race is more easily lost - two race leaders (Taylor Phinney and former champion Justo Tenorio) lost their top position by failing to follow the moves of their rivals. Taking control in their place was Aleksandr Pluchkin of Metinvest, who is now so close to a first GT victory after coming so close on numerous occasions. Just two stages remains: a summit finish up the Angliru, and a final long time trial.

Everyone wants to Be a Pro

The Pro Cyclist mode was a new addition to PCM this year, and it is proving to be a popular area of discussion, with the General thread now closing in on 50 pages in length. One recent area of discussion is about how it is possible to create a balanced statistic, and in case you missed it, tazzy4u2's post from a couple of weeks ago provides a very useful guide to the stat limits that the game tends to give you. You'll need to use the PCM Fast Editor if you want to get around that!

Also catching the eye this week has been the Be a Pro Stories thread with some great 'wall of text' posts from Shonak and moldef, documenting the careers of Igor Vizcaya and Steffen Moldef respectively. They are certainly worth the read, and it would be great to see more games being regularly documented there! The largest PCM15 Story is also in the Be a Pro format, as zuff is now into the 4th season with Franck Signori using his 1980s DB, with a distinctive image reporting style. To neatly tie our themes together, Signori has been competing in the Vuelta this week, and performed very well!

Console game patch

The largest thread in our Tour de France 2015 console forum asks if anybody is buying a game. Well, if anyone did, then Cyanide have within the last half an hour released a patch for the game. This includes an updated database, bug fixes, and a reduced difficulty for mountain stages.

Bad week for Garmin - Cannondale

Talansky might get on a GT podium if his form is good (Tafiolmo)

Yeah maybe if he's given a 30 minutes headstart. (Spilak23)

Dan Martin at Etixx?I don't like him and don't want him at Etixx. (The Schleck Fan)

Now I don't like the whole Etixx squad anymore :/ (Paul23)

I hope he crashes just as much as he did with Garmin (baseballlover312)

Thread of the Week

Transfer Season 15/16. As quoted above, this thread gave a fascinating insight into the inner workings of a cycling fanboy.

And one to watch: Team Aegon. User-rider stories don't have the greatest record of longevity, but Selwink is back with a new attempt for PCM15, after the success of his Projob-Odfjell story in PCM13.

The Velogames Fantasy League for the Vuelta a Espana has opened. PCM.Daily has again created a Fantasy League, which everyone can join with following code: 17094554.

Feel free to join and discuss the action of the Vuelta in the daily Vuelta stage threads as also in the Velogames Vuelta a Espana thread here.

Enjoy a nice Vuelta and may the best win!

Category: Story (Discovery Channel by squire, PCM09)

After being disbanded in 2007, the Discovery Channel team came back just two years later - to enter the 2009 campaign with almost the same roster and no less than Lance Armtrong leading the squad. One of the first highlights in the comeback season would be the Tour of California (held in February): with Levi Leipheimer (35) and Jaroslav Popovych (29) as the team's captains. And how they delivered: Popovych stormed to an impressive victory in stage three, where he attacked a small group of favorites to take yellow. In another key stage - an ITT on day seven - Discovery Channel held all cards in their hands, as also Levi Leipheimer took a narrow stage-win (beating Fabian Cancellara by one second) to move up to 2nd in the GC.

The duo did well to then defend this 1-2 in the GC and turn their team's comeback into a huge success: "Team Discovery Channel is back in style!" (Squire)... Popovych would then go on to podium Paris - Nice as 3rd in the GC (grabbing another stage-win). And speaking of success: this award winning story (Team story of the year 2010) would just become one big hit on PCMDaily - being continued until the end of the Tour de France 2011 with a total of 60 pages.

Not relevant for this thread, but Jesleyh is on 47 zabels - Ollfardh (PCMDaily Expansion Pack Announcement)

PCMdaily Expansion Pack for PCM15 released

The eagerly awaited and most importand download of the year has arrived: the Expansion Pack V1.0 for PCM15 has been released this week! We're proud to say that this is probably the most complete Expansion Pack in years, with more features than ever. We've added more teams, even more custom sponsors, over 90 new races, sponsorkits for most races, real contracts for all WorldTour riders and much more. (Jesleyh)

Huge credits to the Database Team: haasje33, Jesleyh, Kentaurus, Matt17br, Paul23, Selwink, Sgdanny, Zecha and of course all other contributors such as clamel (xml files), Alakagom (Stats) or Jacky Durand (Sponsorkit). To provide a proper download speed for this huge file, it would be great to see you guys "sharing" the pack on torrent.

Note that a V1.5 now has been released and has been uploaded in the download section.  

The Past and the Future

In addition to our website's very special Expansion pack release, we've also seen a few more DB projects popping up. Definitely some interesting news: ruben is coming up with a historic database. His RDB 2008 will feature probably one of the more favorite years of cycling. It's based on an old DB from OlegTinkoff and any help with shirts and other stuff is very welcome.

Two other projects will go the opposite way though: the (unknown) Future! EP Add-On | The Next Generation DB by sgdanny and the 2022 Future Database by haasje33. While the Next Generation just features riders born in 1993 or later (making for a half real, half fantasy DB), the Future obviously goes one step further and tries to "recreate" a possible "real world of cycling" in a few years from now. You can now already check the team's lists for both databases.

The Parallel DB from 4895 goes another step (or three or ten) steps further then: Imagine you are in a parallel dimension, a dimension where Marcel Kittel and Mark Cavendish will be better climber in the world, a dimension where World Tour's teams will dream to access in Continental and on the contrary, Continental's teams would do everything to don't down in World Tour.. Nuff said.

Old members and admins, new spambots and trolls

I almost feel like a veteran, with so many new faces around me. It's almost as if I feel like... like... a dad. (cactus-jack)

Hmmm, some spambots making their way on to the scene tonight. Some nice nostalgia. It's been a while. (baseballover312)

Yeah. Jeez. Come on Admins, quit slacking. I would have had it cleaned up by now. (Mresuperstar)

yes,your´re right, I may be a idiot. (troll)

Sam who?

Simone Ponzi (Good Energy) just wrote ManGame-history last week. We already had Sam Bewley completing a Monument-triple a few weeks ago. And now we (well, most of us) enjoyed someone else stepping up big time: the perfect Ardennes week! Ponzi became the first MG-rider to complete the prestigious Ardennes triple, when he won Liege - Bastogne - Liege in a sprint against Simon Spilak, Jan Bakelants and Yuri Trofimov. Epic stuff once again.

Speaking of Spilak: the ManGame just brought up it's very own 2agan, as 2pilak finished as runner-up in all three Ardennes classic. Peter Sagan? Overperformed (he's not the beast as he's in real life) and surprisingly went for two Top-5 results.

Thread of the Week

The Politics Thread. Donald Trump and a critical debate. 

..still enjoying!

Other Races 2015: already featured in last week's news, but with some interesting racing from the Tour of Utah (now finished) and Vuelta Colombia (still running), it's certainly a thread worth reading these days. Special credit to Stromeon for providing us some in-depth looks/blogging from the action in South America, where Mauricio Ortega is currently leading the GC ahead of defending champion Óscar Sevilla.

We're proud to present the 2015 PCMdaily Expansion Pack V1.0, which is our most complete release for PCM15. Finally it is released!

The database includes lots of new features and takes your PCM15 game to the next level, where these new features will enhance your game experience. We've worked really hard on the database and we hope you'll enjoy it!

We're proud to say that this is probably the most complete Expansion Pack in years, with more features than ever. We've added more teams, even more custom sponsors, over 90 new races, sponsorkits for most races, real contracts for all WorldTour riders and much more.

Because of the amount of features we've added, the size of the EP is much bigger as well. With a total of over 13GB it will take a while to download. Therefore we have given you 2 download options(with more coming later): a torrent and a MEGA file.

The PCM.daily Expansion Pack V1.0 is now downloadable in the PCM.daily download center. It is an all-in, meaning you don't need any earlier Expansion Pack downloads for PCM 15.

If you'd like to know more about the features of this database, make sure to click on read more, where we have explained it in much more detail.

We hope you enjoy the database and any question can be asked on the forum in the PCM.daily Database Projects section for PCM15.

Note that there is a V1.1 ''day one fix'' out right from the start, it is downloadable here.