Its a little known fact that Im an avid fantasy baseball fan. Not fantasy in the same way we here play fantasy football, but computer simulated, fantasy baseball.

Been playing in an online league for more years that I would admit so when given the opportunity to write a review of <a href="http://www.premiership-coach.com/index.html">Premiership coach[/url], the worlds first AFL management game, I jumped at the chance.

Not only that, but Ive been give the oppotunity to give three copys away. More on that at the bottom.

For those of you completely new to this sort of fantasy game, Premiership Coach gives you the chance to pick and coach your own squad using the real players from the league. Each player is given a statistical profile which closely mirrors their actual skill set and talents on the field. You pick a team from the pool of players in a draft and then coach them through a season (or many) in the hopes of taking the flag.

For the most part, I see this as being a game of two halfs. Theres the gameday action and then there is everything else.

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Im going to start with the everything else. And I say everything else because it offers an extremely comprehensive overview of what you would expect from a game like this. It measures a player over 31 different categories, from evasion to goalkicking on the run, from play reading to x-factor as well as their general ability to play in various positions around the ground. It offers the ability to take over your clubs training routines, instructing your forward line to work on their Goal kicking abilities, while getting your defenders to improve their contested marking abilities. Whats beautiful about it is that there are 24 different training schedules on offer, ranging from conditioning, to skills and to structure, that you can use, so if you want to train your midfielders to be better at a contested grab, or want your forwards to improve their in and under work, you can do that. Its all up to how you structure your team/gameplan.

And structuring your gameplan you will, an easy-to-use interface will enable you to change your game plan to play down the wings/corridor, to take longer/shorter options, to man up or play loose, to run and carry or chips around, decide how much you value flooding your opponent. Theres a bunch of team-wide options you can chose from. That then goes down to the player level, where you can instruct some to play tight, some loose, you can pick a player to be a loose man in defence, or get your forward flankers to play down the ground. Youre truely offered a lot of freedom when creating a team and setting up a gameplan.

Then theres the regional leagues, scouting, staffing, finance and all aspects of running your club. All of it is pretty well done and is intuitive in getting what you need.

And then there is the gameday section. Viewing each player as a small numbered circle on a top-down view of a football field, while kinda ugly, becomes exactly what you want to see once you get the hang of it. Moving players between positions is as easy as draging and dropping (though annoyingly, you cant drag a bench player onto the field, the field player must be dragged to the bench.)

All in all, the AI controlling your players does a pretty good job, however it does seem to do a couple of silly things. The CHF passing to the full forward from 40+ out is annoying, while the sheer number of out-on-the-fulls is astounding.

The commentary again, is pretty good, but annoying, it has a nasty habit of skipping events. So one minute, youre running the ball out of defence, the next, the ball has been kicked back into their forward line. Kind of like watching a game live on the AFL feed where 30 seconds later, your team is looking just a little stuffed and youre not quite sure just how that came to be.

Both of these problems, Im sure will improve as the game matures, and really are small fry in comparison to all the things that this game does right.

Personally, Im looking forward to the day where you can have multiple player coaches, running each team in a league, and then uploading to the leagues administrator who runs the weekends games.

But that might be because the online leagues are my favorite part of the baseball.

All in all though, its a very enjoyable game. One that you should all at least give the demo a go. Its some good fun. And, to those three copies we have to give away, if you <a href="http://www.premiership-coach.com/index.html">download a copy of the demo[/url] and comment on how it went below, youll be in the running to win the full version. Which is awesome. Well leave the competition up to give you a chance to give it a crack over the long weekend and announce the winners this time next week. (basically, well be putting everyone who comments into a virtual hat, and getting an online random number generator to spit out three lucky names!)

Now, coming to a post near you, The Essendon Jets - A year in review. (essentially, the original review I wrote which details how I went in my first few games. )

Additionally, the first patch came out today, which should correct a couple of the issues found! So get on it