Madden franchise mode on steroids
NFL Head Coach 09 fixes many of the problems of it's predecessor, but still isn't quite perfect.
I'll start with the bad and end with the good. My biggest complaints are actually a lack of control in a few key areas. Don't get me wrong, this game gives you ten times as many options as any other football sim has dreamed of, but a couple of problems hold the game back from it's true potential. Chief among them is the inability to negotiate contracts on YOUR terms. You can negotiate with players on their contracts, but the negotiation is stuck into a limited window. For example, players decide how many years their contract will be, and a rough estimate on how much money it will cost you. So if you want to sign a player for 7 years instead of 3, you're out of luck, even if you want to give them extra money to do 7 years, you still can't. That makes planning the future of your franchise a little harder to deal with because it can wreak havoc on your salary cap which is the next gripe I have.
It is extremely hard to stay under the salary cap in this game if you want to have any star players on your roster. If you draft a stud rookie, you can afford him until his contract runs out, and then you pretty much have to break the bank in order to keep him, subsequently crippling your ability to retain other key players, or sign new free agents. And god forbid you ever find yourself over the salary cap, because the game doesn't give you the option to re-negotiate a player's contract to free up cap space. In fact, the game won't even allow you to cut some players if the cap penalty will put you in the negative. So if you find yourself over the cap, a lot of times the only way to proceed is to go into the season with less players than you need to field a complete roster, and hope that some of your overpaid vets retire in the off-season.
My next complaint is the inability to negotiate specific trades. You can propose trades to teams, but the CPU gives you a list of pre-determined packages to offer to that team. There is no option to trade draft picks for draft picks unless you're actually in the middle of the draft itself, and even then you're limited to certain packages that the computer has pre-determined. Want to trade a 1st round pick and a 2nd round pick for a stud player? You can't do it unless that happens to be one of the packages that the computer decides to allow you to offer. And in general teams are very stingy to deal with in trading, demanding more than they should on nearly every trade scenario. So if you want to trade up to grab a certain player in the draft, they're really going to take advantage of you to do so. Trades are rarely fair in your favor, which makes them not worth the trouble 95% of the time.
A few years into your career you'll also notice other teams start to get into salary cap trouble and they'll end up outright cutting star players. Many times those players are so unaffordable that no other team in the league can sign them. This can work in your favor as that player then will pretty much be forced to accept a 1 year deal for 900k, and then you'll have the rights to negotiate a new contract with him after that season. While it's helpful, its unrealistic. The programmers should have polished the computer A.I. a little more so that teams are cutting Pro Bowl players that are still in their 20's.
My last major complaint is the coach hiring system. If you pick a team that starts out with crappy coaches, it's going to take you a while to get good coaches to replace them. 95% of the "free agent" coaches are horrible, so if you have a good defensive coordinator or offensive line coach, and they decide to retire, you're pretty much screwed for a few years. They should have given you more options on hiring coaches.
Those are my major concerns with the game. A couple of smaller gripes would be that if the owner suggests you do something and you don't do it, you have a drop in your "Approval Rating" even if the move makes no sense whatsoever. For example the owner may suggest you draft a certain player, and if you decide to draft someone else, you will have a drop in your approval rating even if you end up drafting a better player. The owner will often suggest you cut certain players on your team, and if you don't it's another drop in your approval rating, even if that player is a key part of your roster. But in the end, as long as you're winning games, your approval rating will stay good, so it's not a huge issue, just an annoying one.
Now onto the good things. My favorite aspect of the game is the Coaches Skills tree. As you play games your coaches will earn experience points that they can spend to buy certain skills. For example your defensive backs coach can buy a skill that will improve your secondary's ability to intercept the ball. It's fun to earn those points and start turning your coaches into geniuses that can really help your team. The unfortunate thing is that you can spend a few years building a coach and have nearly all of his skills purchased, and then out of nowhere he can decide to retire, and then you're stuck with a crappy slew of free agent coaches to replace him.
I can't really go on too much longer about the other good things about this game, but you can probably read more about them in the Gamespot reviews. It's a very deep and innovative football simulator, and if you can get past the negative things I mentioned, this can be a highly addictive game that will eat up hours and hours of your time.