NFL Head Coach 09: Prima Official Game Guide

Good book and thorough enough on each aspect of the game. A must for Madden or NCAA Football players looking to get an edge in making their own plays. Gives you more control over features the other two dont.

This is a high quality guide for NFL Head Coach 09, which is currently (August 13, 2008) only available when you buy the bundled Collectors Edition of Madden 09. This is the guide that should have been included with the game itself. Nearly half of this guide is filled with instructions on HOW to play the game and HOW to use the Play Editor - and that's a good thing. The lame 12 page pamphlet that EA ships with the game itself is basically useless and this guide answers most of the gameplay questions. There are so many things happening behind the scenes in this game that you would have no idea about unless you either figured it out on your own (which would take hours and hours worth of restarting Career mode to fix your mistakes), or took a look at this Prima guide. The second half of the guide details various play strategies for each of the NFL teams. It breaks down each team's best offensive and defensive plays in easy to understand terms (strangely, it doesn't include any player names in any of the descriptions, only their jersey numbers). They've also included a pretty good primer on professional football offensive and defensive formations and strategies in general. I would have liked to see a bit more detail about the "strategy" of the off season and free agent tendencies. Instead, this guide acts more like the (missing!) instruction manual and doesn't give you many specific things to try, like bundling draft picks with signing bonuses in order to snag elusive players. Likewise, although the Play Editor section is descriptive and explains it's function very well, but doesn't offer you much advice regarding WHAT pieces and parts that will make for a great play. Unless you're already pretty good with football strategies, you'll learn HOW to move the X's and O's around, but you won't learn WHY. Some illustrated examples would have been great.