VG247: New Playstation Store impressions

Impressions of the new PS Store now Firmware 2.30's been released.

The first thing you notice is how lightning quick it is to log on to the new Store. No sooner has one of your five thumbs depressed the X button, the new interface appears with a huge banner on the left of the screen and 20 squares on the right detailing type of content, genre, and so on.

However, in stark contrast to the initial log-in, the squares themselves do take some time to fill up with little diagrams of a sportsman running which symbolises, you guessed it, sports games, a chequered flag for racing and so forth.

Just in case you don't know what an action or shooter game is, after you select an image the left half of the screen gives you some detailed information, such as the fact an FPS game means you shoot stuff and a Racer means you drive a car.

If waiting isn't your thing then don't click on one these symbols, as the list of games takes ages to arrive. And we mean ages. When we started writing this article we clicked on 'Latest' and the full list of icons still isn't in although we've now almost finished.

The top menu is split up into eight subsections listing everything from PSP games (nice addition) to Game Add-ons (another good idea) to We Recommend - which at the moment is just about every game on the Store you can buy.

Although the interface is a lot more user-friendly we still miss being able to search for stuff by name. The ability to search by title instead of trawling through three or four sub-menus and waiting around ten minutes to see if it appears would have been great.

Also, for those of you who couldn't wait to try out the Super Stardust HD add-on, although the Solo Game Pack was ready to download early this morning, the patch for SSHD needed to make the Game Pack work wasn't ready. However, the internet has just informed us that all is now well: you should be prompted for an update when you fire up the game, and it'll do the rest for you.

By Mike Bowden