Ever get frustrated by the fact that only a handful of plays in your favorite team’s playbook are actually useful? Have some creative ideas of your own that you would like to try on the field? Do you just want to re-create the plays you used to run in the glory days of your high school/college career?

Unless your sport is hockey and your game is NHL 09, you are out of luck, because for some unknown reason, sports developers have decided to keep the virtual coach inside all of us bottled up for well over a decade.

The history of the "create-a-play" feature begins on the SNES and the otherwise forgettable Emmitt Smith Football, released in 1995. The game was released with a bare-bones play editor that let you take existing formations from the game and assign a small number of routes and blocking assignments to offensive players and an even smaller number of blitzes/coverages to defensive players.

The create-a-play feature never really caught on in other console sports games -- that is until it became a huge selling point when NFL Blitz made its console debut in 1998.

The play editor that was exclusively included in the Nintendo 64 version of Blitz was unique because its routes and formations were not predetermined. You could literally tell your players to lineup anywhere on the field before the snap, and go anywhere on the field after the snap.

But, by far, the best part of Blitz’s create-a-play feature was the ability to take your N64 memory card to the arcade and plug it into one of the card readers on a Blitz '99 cabinet.

In fact, some of my fondest gaming memories come via the lip I used to receive from other players when I would pop in my custom plays and hit them with stuff they were totally unprepared for.

Reason being, the play selection in Blitz was extremely limited back then -- less than 20 offensive plays and 10 defensive plays -- and veteran players generally knew how to stop or contain every single one of the default plays.

So when you would bring in some totally new play designs to attack guys who had memorized the patterns of just about every formation in the game, the real football game started. After all, in real football the defense is not supposed to know exactly where all your players are going to be 90 percent of the time.

And Blitz's play editor was an excellent way to keep defensive coordinators on their toes, just like they have to be in real life, and just like they should be in video games.

Perhaps taking a hint from the success of the play editors created by NFL Blitz and rival football studio 989 Sports -- a year before Blitz arrived on the N64, 989 actually added a play editor to NCAA Gamebreaker '98 -- the Madden developers incorporated their own version of "create-a-play" in the PS2 version of Madden '99. However, as it was in Emmitt Smith Football, Madden’s take on the feature was extremely limited in terms of the types of plays it allowed you to create and the types of modes you could use the plays in.

Not surprisingly, like many other Madden features, the play editor completely disappeared from the franchise during its transition to the PS3 and Xbox 360.

This year, EA attempted to reintroduce the feature into next-gen Madden by including a play editor in NFL Head Coach 09 -- I realize I am ignoring the fact that you need both games to fully use the play editor. Either way, the feature remains just as neutered as it has always been:

• Limits you to only 30 total plays
• Does not let you create a custom playbook
• Only lets you use those custom plays in offline games

How bad is the 30 play limit? Well, let me just say that Emmitt Smith Football, a game released in 1995 for the SNES with a development team of less than a dozen people and a budget so small that it could not even afford the NFL or NFLPA licenses, had a storage limit of 60 plays.

Surprisingly, Madden is not the only football franchise to leave the create-a-play feature out of its current-gen games. For those who do not remember, the NFL 2K series had a play editor included in its 2000 debut on the Dreamcast.

Yet, All-Pro Football 2K8, a game made by the same company that is supposed to be all about customization, lets you create practically everything but your own plays. From my perspective, It almost seems like there was some sort of conspiracy to keep the feature out of the game.

Basketball games have fared even worse over the years. EA has never put a play editor into any of its NBA or NCAA games, and 2K only implemented the feature in the 2K8 version of the now-deceased College Hoops series.

Leave it to the kings of innovation up in EA Canada to resurrect the "create-a-play" feature in the award-winning NHL franchise.

The EA Canada developers have included an awesome create-a-play mode in their NHL game the last two years; and in the '09 version they even let you take those created plays online, which is a first in a genre where developers always seem too willing to fall back on the lame excuse that user-created plays will somehow "break" the balance of their games.

Well, a play editor definitely did not break NFL Blitz back in the day, and it sure as heck has not broken NHL 09.

In fact, if there is one thing that I hope other developers take note of from NHL 09, it is the way the game allows teams to completely customize their playing strategy, from the players they put on their roster to the plays they call in the middle of the action. Add that in with the fact that it all works online like it does offline -- all without any kind of "exploitation" going on with regards to fair and balanced online play -- and the feature becomes something that deserves to be mimicked.

And if EA Canada can do it, other developers should be doing it too, right?

That seems to be something I have been saying a lot this gaming year, and I hope I do not end up saying the same thing next year when the 2010 titles roll around.

Prove me wrong developers, please! Bring back the create-a-play feature big time in 2009!