Pro Cycling Manager - Tour de France 2008

To kick off the new season, we are pleased to reveal the first images from Pro Cycling Manager – Tour de France 2009.

An essential sport franchise, Pro Cycling Manager is back in a more polished than ever form to please fans of the popular series. This new edition, developed by the French studio Cyanide, promises to be the most exciting of all. It will include the most famous Tour de France 2009 faithfully reproduced in detail and for the first time the Spanish Tour (La Vuelta) which has become an official competition in the game.

Pro Cycling Manager – Tour de France 2009 is the perfect mix between management and sport simulation. It puts you in the shoes of the general manager of one of the 65 official cycling teams and asks you to handle everyday aspects of this position. Choice of the teams, transfers, trainings, finances, gear or searches for new talent, many various missions are required to position the most competitive team on the starting line.

During the 180 races playable in real time 3D, you intervene directly to guide your cyclists. It's up to you to define the best strategies and tactics to win the race.

The management aspect of Pro Cycling Manager and its famous carrier mode offer many novelties and improvements for a richer game experience. General Managers can now freely create their own team, choose their secondary sponsors as well as identify and target new recruits thanks to an ingenious point system. They will also benefit from novelties like never-before-seen, customizable objectives, a new way to manage finances and a more realistic transfer AI… all these elements allow the game to be deeper and richer than any other.

The race is also packed with innovations. It has a new and more ergonomic game interface, and an improved AI to allow more realistic-than-ever behaviors from the cyclists. An amazing effort has been put into the legs' screenplay and rendering. The result has never been so beautiful and immersive. Water, vegetation, spectators, animations are some of the elements that have been reworked with a concern for realism in order to offer nicer and more beautiful stages to the players.

Last year's acclaimed track cycling mode is back: it includes 4 new explosive events that are discoverable in the game's new velodromes. Scratch race, flying 200m time trial, points race and omnium join last year's time trial, keirin and elimination to bring hours of intense gameplay.

Pro Cycling Manager – Tour de France 2009 will be released on PC in June 2009.

About Focus Home Interactive

Founded in 1996, Focus Home Interactive is a French publishing and distribution company based near Paris, France. Known for the diversity, quality and originality of its catalogue, Focus now publishes and distributes many of its titles throughout Europe and also world-wide in both boxed retail and digital distribution formats. The last five years have been very successful for Focus in France, with many of its PC licenses becoming top-sellers. Focus has also published several original titles, including the adventure game Runaway, the renowned Cycling Manager and the much-loved TrackMania. The coming months will be exciting and full of surprises with the release of high-quality games such as Blood Bowl, TrackMania DS, Runaway: A Twist of Fate, Sherlock Holmes and sport games dedicated to major events such as the America’s Cup or the Tour de France.

http://www.focus-home.com

About Cyanide Studio

Founded in 2000, Cyanide is a privately-held video game development studio. It employs a total of 70 staff, divided between its headquarters in Paris, France, and its subsidiary studio in Montreal, Canada. Best known for its sport management sims such as the popular Cycling Manager series and Pro Rugby Manager, Cyanide broke the mold in the heroic-fantasy universe with the famous Chaos League and the Hack’n’Slash Loki. 2009 will see the release of Blood Bowl, the video game adaptation of Games Workshop's well-known board game, as well as the new edition of Pro Cycling Manager – Tour de France 2009 and the studio's first MMOG, Dungeon Party!

http://www.cyanide-studio.com