I can’t decide if I like this game, or if I fucking hate it. I’m pretty sure it’s nowhere inbetween. As I play, I’m either thinking, “This is fun,” or “I can’t believe I just spent three hours doing this.”

The game is supposed to mimic the experience of an NFL Head Coach, and while I’ve never been an NFL Head Coach, I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t even come close to that experience. Not that I’d expect it to, really, but you know, I don’t think a coach schedules four hours of “office hours” everyday where he does absolutely nothing.

The game starts at the end of last-season. You create a coach, determine what he looks like, what he wears (unfortunately a pretty plaid skirt isn’t an option, if you’re looking to build a Mike Holmgren clone), and some very basic things about coaching philsophy, like 4-3 defense, or 3-4, west coast offense, or balanced, etc.

I don’t remember much of the off-season that took place before the draft, mainly because I was bored to tears. I don’t know if that was the best strategy for the EA people… having the first part of the game be the most mind-numbingly boring. And then strike two came pretty quickly with the draft. I traded Drew Brees (inexplicably still on the Bolts roster) for the 10th pick in the draft, where I took Santonio Holmes, who, dealing another blow to the EA game’s realism, does not come with a lengthy criminal record. And then Vince Young fell to me at 19th (Reggie Bush didn’t go until 7th).

But the second strike took place when none of my draft picks actually made it to my team. There was no draft pick signing period… apparently my roster was full, and thus, my draft picks were automatically released to the free agent pool. No warning, no opportunity to cut anyone… they were just gone.

But I kept wading through until I got the preseason, and things got better. The week before a game, the game is structured so you have four tasks a day. Two of them, you can determine on your own, and two of them are “office hours,” which allows you to sit at your desk and do anything you want, which will be absolutely nothing. You can’t do anything–propose a trade, call a free agent, cut a player, ogle a cheerleader–without scheduling for it. And if you want to schedule time for a trade, it has to come at the expense of a practice. You can’t replace your “office hours.”

But the practices are useful. You select the type of practice you want, who you want to work out, contact or non-contact, and then do it. The more you practice guys through the week, the better they’ll be during the game. And the more you practice certain plays, the more effective they’ll be for you during the game. That part, I liked.

You’ll also have meetings scheduled… some to get a scouting report on your upcoming opponent (which is fairly in-depth, even if it will have you believing that Kerry Collins can be the greatest QB ever), some to talk to your assistant coaches and/or owner (the dialogue is pretty bad and gets repetitive quickly), where they’ll make suggestions on starters, or tell you what positions are ready or not ready to go. You also build “trust” levels with coaches, though I’ve yet to see any useful application for these ratings.

Which brings us to the best part of the game, the games themselves. Coaching these things is pretty damn fun, though it does have its own limitations. You call your plays, of course, and at any point, you can elect to talk to your guys on the bench. Your options for talking to them are “aggressive” or “passive.” Passive is sometimes a compliment, sometimes a mild rebuke… and aggressive is usually yelling at a guy. I don’t really do a lot of this.

The cool thing is, pre-snap, how you can instruct your QB. I have Vince Young set permanently to look to scramble, and he does so effectively. But you can tell him on individual plays to lock onto his primary receiver, protect the ball, look downfield, get rid of it quickly, take a deep drop, put on a fucking helmet if he’s going to plow into an old lady’s windshield, all sorts of things. And there are additional adjustments you can make… audibles, hot routes, shifting your line protection, etc. Disappointingly, there is no pre-snap option to flip the play and run it to the other side.

Defensively, the pre-snap options are a little disappointing. With your line and linebackers, you can shift them, but not really change anyone’s assignment. How bad is that? You can do these things in the ’06 version of Madden, but not in the ’07 version of Head Coach? You can’t manually decide to double-team a receiver, or make someone blitz.

But coaching the game, again, can be fun. I celebrate these touchdowns probably more than I do when I score them on my own in Madden. And I’m cruising… I’ve gone through four preseason games, and one regular season game, and I’ve yet to lose. The first game I played, I eeked out a 21-18 win over Green Bay, and since then, it’s been four blowouts. Chicago, Minnesota, San Francisco, and in the Monday Night opener, the Raiders, have all gotten the MJD-beatdown. Routs, all of them. The game might just be too easy.

So that’s where I am with it. Overall, I’m disappointed… it feels like they missed so many opportunities to make this thing truly in-depth. Any test-based PC game could easily destroy everything in this game that isn’t the actual game. But, that said, I can’t deny that the games themselves are fun. I’m gonna give it another few days before deciding to take it back.