NFL Head Coach 09 Hands-On
We get our hands on EA Sports' football management sim for the first time.
With the 2008 NFL Draft almost upon us, football fans are thinking about the future of their teams, and what they might do to turn things around if they were given the power to run their favorite team. The upcoming NFL Head Coach 09--which was recently announced as a pack-in with the 20th anniversary edition of Madden NFL 09--will give fans the chance to live that fantasy. We saw the game earlier in the year at the 2008 NFL Scouting Combine and got a feel for the extensive changes to scouting and player signing as compared to the original NFL Head Coach. Yesterday, we got an updated look at the game, including a look at the actual in-game play calling for the first time.
As the demo began, the producer guiding us through the game jumped directly into the Coach Now mode, which will give you instant action on the field. As with the day-to-day coaching duties that surround the off-season activities, everything you do in an actual game is centered around the clipboard interface. This feature will give you a moment-by-moment recap of your next big decision as coach--be it making a substitution, make adjustments on the field and, of course, calling plays.
Madden veterans will feel right at home when calling plays, but there are some important and compelling changes on hand. The interface of available plays organizes your playbook in the standard ways--formation, play type, and so on. The crucial difference is that once you've made your call and send your players out on the field, you'll be able to pause the game and adjust any player in formation on the fly. With its grid effect superimposed over the field, it looks like a more sophisticated version of the player creator in the original game. In addition to adjusting player positions on the field, you can reassign individual players to new assignments, for example new routes for receivers, or new blocking assignments for your linemen.
Creating plays up on the fly is good for making adjustments; where NFL Head Coach 09 shines is in the ability to save any created play you've just run, rename it, and add it to your profile's playbook. You'll be able to save up to 200 offensive and 200 defensive created plays to your playbook, export them to your Madden NFL 09 profile for use in that game (though you won't be able to use created plays online in Madden).
You'll also be able to upload created plays to your EA Locker for sharing with other Head Coach players. Here you can download the plays of other fans in the game and vote on your favorites. Interestingly, EA Sports producers told us that the AI-controlled coaches in the game will also be importing some of those user-created plays into their playbooks. In addition, as you continue your career as a coach, you'll occasionally see college coaches enter the ranks of the NFL--you'll be able to hire them and import their playbooks (which might include college-specific plays and formations such as the Maryland I or the Wishbone) into your own list of plays.
In the original NFL Head Coach, you could only play five-minute quarters; that's been rectified for Head Coach 09, and you'll be able to play full quarters as you go. Of course, if you're looking for things to move quicker, you can always check out the supersim options, which will let you skip ahead one play at a time, or further ahead in the game. Unfortunately, though you can use your teams and original playbooks online against other opponents in Head Coach, you'll only be able to play the games out using the supersim style of play, which is a bummer in terms of realism but, at the very least, will probably keep games quick.
Roster updates will be available in NFL Head Coach but will only be available to you if you start your season in the preseason (not in the off-season, which is the other option available to you). These will be the same roster updates that Madden NFL 09 users will get, but with updated ratings, player information, and--possibly--player portraits to boot.
While we would have love to have spent more time examining the in-game gameplay, we had to move on to other aspects of the game which we still hadn't seen--namely the NFL Draft. As with practically every other aspect of your job as head coach, you'll have goals when it comes to drafting talent that you will be expected to attain; indeed, your overall performance rating will hinge on how you perform in the draft. An example of a goal might be to draft a quarterback with an overall rating of 85 (and remember, ratings in NFL Head Coach aren't an absolute value, but rather a measure of a player's ability set against your philosophy as a coach. If you're looking for a mobile guy in the pocket, even a great quarterback like Peyton Manning wouldn't fit in your program.)
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- GameSpot Score7.0good
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- Electronic Arts
- EA Tiburon
- Football Management
- Release: Sep 3, 2008
- ESRB: Teen
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