I also browsed through the PSN store looking at the recent stuff, and although Ratchet & Clank: Quest For Booty looks tempting, I should probably finish off the R&C Future game I already started first… Instead I grabbed the Head Coach 09 demo; normally I’m not much of a football guy, but I was curious what it would be like from the management side rather than as a player.

As expected, it’s rather stat-heavy, with people representing not just the players but all of the support roles on your team as well like position-specific coaches, coordinators, and trainers, with skill levels, purchasable skill trees, cross-league effectiveness rankings, different ways you can ask to change their behaviours, ‘needs’ that each of them wants fulfilled, approval ratings, etc…

It’s all rather overwhelming and there didn’t seem to be much to do anyway since the demo starts you off with an already well-developed team, so I skipped ahead to the first game. Since it’s a management sim, you don’t control the players directly but instead do things like pick what plays to run, make adjustments to the defensive line, and respond to other events that come up like injuries and requests for substitutions. Or you can just let your coaches make the decisions and see what happens, which I pretty much had to do thanks to my complete ignorance of football.

Interesting, but it’s really for people who are true football fanatics, not me.