metallica guitar hero!!

i don't think i am a hardcore fan of the recent slew of guitar and band based games.  i enjoy playing them but haven't gone out of my way to buy the games or song packs.  But me being the huge fan of metallica that i am, i went out to buy the game so i could rock out all day yesturday.  But even if i were to put aside my love for the band, the game would still honestly be the best of the series in my eyes.  As a series, the main goal is to give the player the feeling of playing the guitar and at the same time produce fun and challenging experiences with each song.  No other list of songs has been more physically fun to play then these, and no list of songs has been quite as challenging.  The question in my mind is, who should get the credit for this?  I am quite sure that they programmers are simply getting better at the same job they've been doing for the past 2 years, but most of me believes that the credit belongs to the music.  It's not simply because they are metallica, it is because they are musically gifted and have the rights to songs that are inherently fun to play, whether on a real guitar, ps3 guitar, or air guitar.  So as more of these artist based titles come out, i hope developers and artist realize where the main sales of the games are coming from, and where the main enjoyment of the games are coming from.  I'm sure the beatles had very little trouble negotiating their upcoming rock band game, i just hope they get all the credit they deserve.

One other thing with these money hungry music games, that resonates with all other games as a matter of fact.  I am on my third guitar at my house, either because my brother strums too hard, or they are crap.  When buying guitar hero metallica yesturday, i had to buy some older model that didn't have all the features because i did not want to buy an entire drum set.  I was infuriated due to the fact that the gamestop did not have any decent guitars that weren't in a bundle.  Where were all the third party contributors.  I started thinking about the days when you could find a huge arrangement of snes controllers or ps controllers not sold by sony or nintendo.  Maybe the controller market should be opened up again.  Controller designs have been pretty much stagnant across the board up until the wii.  Even the wii though could use some competition in their monopoly.  Look at all the people that r gonna run out and buy wii motion plus.  If they had some competition driving their innovations and designs, there would be no wii motion plus attachment, just a better controller (or batteries).  It'd be nice to have some controller options out there.