Unfortunately, Centenary Edition really isn't much of an improvement over it's predecessor - It is fairly authentic, with stats and trivia crammed into every available space, but the menus and general presentation are so clunky and poor that any good points are overshadowed by the bad ones. The gameplay itself is initially let down by the fact that it feels absolutely nothing like riding a bike, you hold X to pedal steadily and tap it to stand up and pedal (or accelerate), Square is supposedly the brakes (but they don't actually seem to work) and Circle lets you change between a choice of 2 views. The handling snaps from understeer to oversteer very quickly and feels more like digital than analogue, so judging tight corners is a question of luck rather than skill. Probably the only piece of innovation in the entire game is the Stamina gauge, which displays the amount of energy your rider has left and the amount of damage he's taken. Luckily for you, you have 5 water bottles at your disposal that you can use to replenish both stamina and damage, but for some reason you cant drink and pedal at the same time so using them half way up a hill is a very bad idea.

   

There are 5 modes: - Practice, Arcade, Time-Trial, 2 Player and Tour de France. Practice should be the first place you look - It lets you choose from any of the tracks you've unlocked to explore on your own and is the best way to learn the basics, as "helpful" hints pop-up from time to time. Then you may as well jump straight into the Tour de France mode, which is where the heart of the game lies. You create a rider and follow his career all the way to the top (or however far you get before it drives you insane) - you can edit his appearance and change almost every aspect of the bike you ride, including buying new wheels, frames and pedals to boost your chances of winning. You can also use your money from races to fund training if you feel you want to develop your individual stats, and this is all fine, but it doesn't do anything that hasn't been done better before. One thing that really bugged me about this mode was the fact that it actually costs money to rest and recover from damage, so as if it wasn't hard enough to win already, if you were low on cash you'd begin the next race with a disadvantage. The 2 player option removes all the other riders leaving just 2 of you on the track. It feels totally tacked-on, as if they didn't originally plan to include it, and the only real fun that can be had with this mode is seeing who can retire the fastest.

   

The graphics are shockingly basic - the riders lack detail and their animation is jerky, the draw distance is pathetic, the road is a simple texture with no variety and the surrounding areas are often blocky, flat-coloured messes - it could quite easily be an early PS1 title, and doesn't stretch the PS2 in the slightest. The game claims to have 11 perfectly recreated tracks, but visually its so bad I'm not convinced I could recognise them anyway. The fact that there are 99 riders in each race would normally be quite impressive, but they're always split up into 7 or 8 large groups so the road never gets too congested and there are never more than 10 on-screen at one time. They never seem to battle for position or run into each other, but if you happen to collide with one of them you'll usually come off worse and the crash animations are so bad its funny. There is a replay mode, but unlike the original it doesn't have a TV-style camera which I thought was standard in any racing game these days.

Le Tour de France: Centenary Edition is a very bad game, there's no way around it. It's poorly presented and poorly done, and will only appeal to you if you're the type that stays up until 3am to catch the actual event on Eurosport. It's a shame it wasn't better, because a game of this type would be a good addition to the 4-wheel dominated racing genre. As it is, this game doesn't belong in the same league as classics like Moto GP and Gran Turismo, and I really couldn't bring myself to recommend it to anyone.