Preview
NFL Head Coach 09: Your Chance To Show Wayne Fontes What’s Up
September 03, 2008
Six months of football simply won’t satisfy the true NFL junkie. And EA Sports doesn’t think the yearly roll out of Madden NFL 09 and the presence of its arcade cousin, NFL Tour, is enough to sufficiently scratch the itch. NFL Head Coach 09 will fill that gap when it debuts tomorrow on next generation consoles with Colts head coach Tony Dungy on the cover. And by gap I mean the grueling work schedule, the long meetings, the constant player evaluations and the various soul-crushing minutiae of the job turned into an accessible video game.
EA Sports tried this once before with NFL Head Coach on PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2006. Like Bill Cowher, the former Pittsburgh coach who graced the cover, EA has retired that game and started completely from scratch. Das Gamer got a chance to talk to Josh Looman, lead designer at EA Tiburon on the title, about rebuilding the game from the ground up.
On the face of it, this it he chance for anyone who has blamed the fate of their team on the likes of Wayne Fontes or the second coming of Joe Gibbs, Head Coach is a chance to actually put on a pair of nut-huggin Bike shorts and show your mettle. Upon turning on the new game, players have the option of choosing a current head coach and guiding his team to the promised land or creating a new coach from scratch and taking over any NFL team.
Every team has their own campus, complete with new stadiums like the new Lucas Oil Field in Indianapolis, the home for the Colts this coming season. Dynamic weather will give you an indication of what the on-field play will be like any given Sunday. For away games, you go to that stadium and if it’s snowing you’ll know how to prepare for play-calling.
NFL Head Coach is more like a real-time strategy game with some role-playing elements thrown in, than it is a traditional sports game. But the new game, which replaces the boring spreadsheets and shoddy navigation of the original with an intuitive display and coach’s clipboard that makes it a snap to do anything from tender a free agent to scout a college player at the NFL Combine, should appease the fantasy sports and diehard football fans as well as more casual fans.
