Let's get something out of the way right now: I love Rock Band and Guitar Hero. I have sunk more hours of my life to star power and attempting a band high score on plastic instruments than I have practicing my skill on the actual guitar. For my birthday, I held a Rock Band party where all we did was rotate instruments on Rock Band 2, but as I read the news that the next game in the franchise would be Green Day Rock Band, I wondered if the time had come to move on completely from Rock Band.

Rock Band and Guitar Hero have formulas that are, in theory, timeless and nearly perfect. Friends can stand around a TV and make believe that they're the best Rock Band in the world, and with specialized versions of the two games like The Beatles, Aerosmith and Van Halen, fans can enjoy a whole new way to experience their favorite band. However, there's only so much that Activision and Harmonix can add to the experience before it begins to get stale. The market is, unfortunately, saturated with clones and wannabes of the Rock Band franchise, such as Activision's Band Hero and Konami's Rock Revolution.

If you look at a franchise like Dance Dance Revolution, arguably one of the first majorly successful rhythm games, you can see that the only thing that changed from installment to installment was the soundtrack. The major game mechanics stayed exactly the same...but this was before downloadable content. DLC has changed the way that developers look at games, especially music games. The ability to expand your experience with downloadable content has made new installments of a game like Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero or Rock Band more of an unnecessary luxury than anything else.

Why not use downloadable content to continue to expand the library of the current Guitar Hero and Rock Band games and move on to more varied genres of music and forms of input? There is more beyond Pop/Rock in this world, and it would be amazing to see some of it come to a video game. Activision has already started with the well-reviewed but so far commercially unsuccessful DJ Hero, which features a special turntable controller and a whole new genre of music for new players to experience. Why can't Activision take more chances and put out games that shift the genre of music game instead of releasing games like Band Hero, essentially a full clone of Guitar Hero: World Tour (which was a clone of Rock Band)?

The tapestry of music is unlimited in scope, with an amazing number of genres and instruments to draw from. On the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, one of the characters joked about the existence of Harp Hero. The Onion wrote up an entire article on the sluggish sales of Sousaphone Hero. While the proposed games do seem preposterous at first glance, the niche market of folks who play these instruments are there. Some people are begging for a marching band or orchestral version of these music games, and it might be time to branch out into finding ways to input violins, cellos, cornets and even sousaphones into the band repertoire. Furthermore, how has a keyboard not been introduced to music games yet? It's a staple of the '80s and beyond - it should have a place in these games and the exclusion of it is painfully apparent for many songs.

However, the biggest reason Rock Band and Guitar Hero need to stop is that they're pulling focus from some of the most ingenious music and rhythm games in the space of gaming today. Rez, a rhythm-based first person shooter, cleverly blurs the line between a futuristic shooting game and the soothing sounds of music. Elite Beat Agents, a DS game by Nintendo, takes a different approach to rhythm games entirely. The Elite Beat Agents are an organization dedicated to improving the world's problems through song and dance. Players use the DS touch screen to tap their way to happiness in songs like "Sk8r Boi" and classics like "Y.M.C.A."

I'm not suggesting that Rock Band and Guitar Hero go away altogether. Far from it - if Activision and Harmonix ever stop releasing DLC for their music games, I think I would cry for a full day. However, in terms of core gameplay and new ideas, the market is ready for new plastic instruments, new innovations and new genres of music to play along to. DJ Hero is a good start, and I applaud Activision for taking the first leap, but for every game like DJ Hero, there are two clones of Guitar Hero or Rock Band. The market is getting oversaturated and eventually, much like Dance Dance Revolution and Karaoke Revolution, the games will fizzle out from there being too many installments. As for me, I won't be satisfied until there's an Orchestra Hero or Saxophone Hero on the market for to experience classical and jazz music alongside my Rock and Pop.