Previous rants:

Guitar Hero/Rock Band (Part 2)
Guitar Hero/Rock Band (Part 1)
Nintendo: Overview
Nintendo DS
Wii _____ Games
Wii games
Virtual Console
Nintendo Wii
Nintendo DSi
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Hello all and welcome to the third and last part of the Guitar Hero/Rock Band rant. It's been a few weeks since the last rant so to recap what was said so far, I first talked about the extreme obsession of the whole craze and then went onto the expenses for the video games, peripherals and downloadable content. And now for the last big issue with these games:

MILKING!!

That's right, these games, most especially the Guitar Hero franchise, have been milked to death. Activision begun milking their franchise with spinoffs. Now the occasional one such as Rock the 80's would have been tolerable, but they decided to take a step further by making games for individual bands starting with Aerosmith followed by Metallica and now Van Halen, which is to be released later this year.

They announced Guitar Hero: Metallica just before Aerosmith's game was to come out and two months after Metallica's game was out, it was announced for Van Halen to have a Guitar Hero game as well. All these games are coming out in a short period of time and it'll be no surprise if they announce yet another Artist X game around the time Van Halen's game comes out. Infact, due to sales and success, they'll probably announce two more Guitar Hero: Artist X titles around the time Van Halen's game comes out and wouldn't that be milking the franchise even further?

Really, besides the excuse to grab more money than needed, why do they need to make a whole video game on one band? What makes these games so different to the main titles? The most they can do is a plot consisting of a band history or a basic world tour. If they're going all the way to have so many new songs and....just new songs, why can't they just release massive DLC packs? There's already pretty big DLC packs for certain bands such as Iron Maiden and the same thing should be done for those who are getting their own games.

That's not all for the milking in the franchise. Each year, there's a brand new Guitar Hero/Rock Band game which are acceptable if they make actual changes, but when Activision announced the fifth main Guitar Hero, they also announced Guitar Hero: Van Halen, Band Hero and DJ Hero AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME! Seriously, that's four new titles at once.

Band Hero is basically another Guitar Hero spinoff, but will appeal to a younger audience and feature mainstream tracks targetted towards family audiences, the same kind of audience Nintendo mostly care about these days. So unless there'll actually be different instruments for Band Hero (which I highly doubt), why on earth give this game a different title to Guitar Hero? Infact, this is the name the franchise should have now, but obviously the name Guitar Hero is such a big name they refuse to change it to Band Hero, even if drums and vocals are part of these games since World Tour.

DJ Hero is self-explanatory. Your only instrument shall be the DJ turntable, which to be fair isn't a bad idea as it appeals to who have different tastes in music. However, there is a huge problem with making a new series of music rhythm playing. This will become another thing for Activision to milk the fuck out of. Just imagine the yearly games along with spinoffs, most especially those that are based on a specific artist for DJ Hero as well. If they don't end up doing that and keep it to a reasonable amount of releases, good for them but we all know that's not going to happen. We know they're going to make yet more games just to suck up yet more money from their customers.

What's more, now that they're making a new Hero series, what's going to be next? Will they make Hero games based on other instruments? It'll be no surprise if they end up making an Orchestra Hero. Imagine how many peripherals that would have. It would be INSANE and considering Activision are one of the biggest money whores out there, they're bound to do it eventually.

The saddest part about the whole craze is, Activision ACTUALLY INTEND to "triple" the amount of Guitar Hero releases by next year, so there could be around 30 Guitar Hero titles by then and right now, there's around 45 Final Fantasy titles. If they keep this trend up, there'll not only be more Hero games than Final Fantasy games but the Hero series could eventually have more games than Mario, and Mario is known to have a shitload of spin offs. All can be said here is this shit needs to calm down as soon as possible before if it goes completely out of control.

In conclusion, Guitar Hero and Rock Band as games were (and still are excluding all the bullshit) a great idea to begin with, but as time went by and the craze became more pouplar, the companies, more especially Activision, begun to milk the hell out of their franchises by making so many unecessary spinoffs when most of them could easily be huge DLC packs. The amount of games they're making is getting out of hand and it seems they'll only make yet more titles for the sake of more money.

The expenses for the games and DLC content are also ridiculous when a full kit is £150 at first and a single downloadable track is £1.80. This is further proof that the companies want as much money as possible. As for the gamers, there are those who are taking these games far too seriously and need to realise these games were intended to have fun, not who could score the most points on Through the Fire and Flames Expert mode.

All these reasons are why the whole craze has simply gone insane and why I've completely lost interest in the whole thing. After all this ranting on Guitar Hero and Rock Band, I really should relax by playing a few tracks on Audiosurf, a game which I bought for £6 and allows me to play any track I desire.