NFL Head Coach 09 Mini-Review (X360)

EA is back with another attempt at a hardcore sports management simulator, and the results are pretty much the same as last time. If you can get into the right mindset, the wealth of options and responsibilities you are in control of is phenomenal. If you can't get into it, however, it can be the most brutally boring and tedious and terrible thing you will ever see.

To start off, I think that most of what I wrote about the original NFL Head Coach game still stands true in this next-gen version. NFL Head Coach (Xbox) Review . It is still all about bland presentation and staring at stats and menus for 90% of your time with the game. And on game day, watching the horrid CPU try to play a reasonably realistic game of football is still very, very painful. New to Head Coach 09 is the ability to super-sim through games rather than watching them, which is nice. And there are also a number of tweaks and changes and updates to the process of choosing coaches, designing plays, practice, etc. that make the game what it is. But at its core, it is still the same game as before.

And, thus, my main complaints from the first game are still valid. I can play fantasy football and watch real football games on Sunday afternoons and yell at my TV and I don't have to pay a premium to do it. Secondly, the aspects of Head Coach 09 that will appeal to most football fans - making trades, grooming your roster, calling all the right plays, choosing draft picks - are all available in the traditional Madden releases. Not only can you do all of this in Madden, but you'll be able to do it in a game with better presentation and the ability to actually play rather than simply watch. Head Coach fills in all of the gaps with extreme detail and lets you do literally anything and everything a real head coach has to do, but it seems like a niche that maybe didn't need to be filled.

There are certainly people out there that will love this game to death. They appreciate the depth and embrace the slow pace and wealth of responsibilities. Not me, however. Honestly, it isn't that I don't find it interesting or that I don't "get" the game. It is more along the lines that I like to play games that are fun, not games that feel like work. Head Coach 09 feels like work. Because of this disconnect, I won't give it a score. But I will say this: Give it a rental, but definitely don't blind buy.

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