Europe Playstation Store A Bit...Rubbish

Sony released its new Playstation Store yesterday. Anyone that experienced the old web based version will testify that it needed a revamp... badly. So the new version comes as a proper application, no more slow browsing and improved navigation so it's easier to find what you're after. How could it possibly go wrong? Well if it's the European version you're using you'll know how.

Unbelievably it's slower than the old one. Sony say things will improve over the next few days but at the moment the icons either don't load or appear very... very slowly. You end up moving over multiple blank blue squares and having to read the text to see what it is. Then there's the fact that Sony Europe thinks it knows better and has changed the logical categories of the US store to something almost as useless as the old version. The only reason it holds up at the moment is because there isn't a huge amount of content, but as it grows it'll only get worse.

The UK store categories are:
* Latest
* All Games
* Game Add-Ons
* Videos
* PSP Games
* Family Games
* Other Media
* We Recommend

Compared to the USA:
* New Releases
* Downloadable Games
* View All by Title
* Add-ons
* Demos
* Videos
* Themes and Wallpapers
* Featured Items

It's a pain finding demos and dividing games up purely by genre isn't intuative at all. On another note does 'Family Games' really belong on the top level navigation? To be fair if they get the speed up a bit it's a lot slicker than the old interface but don't just make it different from the US for the sake of it when it hampers the usability. Sony...?

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