By Nelson Schneider - 11/17/12 at 05:26 PM CT

After the latest PlayStation 3 hack was revealed, Sony pushed through a whole bunch of updates, both to the PS3’s Cross Media Bar and to the PlayStation Store. Nick believes these updates to be desperate attempts by Sony to avoid having their current home console violated by pirates in the same way that their late PlayStation Portable (PSP) was. I honestly don’t know if that is the case or if the timing of the hack and this string of updates is a coincidence.

What I do know, though, is that the new PlayStation Store interface is an unholy abomination. The original PlayStation Store was decent. It was fairly snappy and free of clutter, with one big promotional box on the front page. It had clear categories for games, DLC add-ons, movies, and all the other minor pointless stuff that nobody cares about (like PS3 Dynamic Themes and 49-cent PSN avatars (because, obviously, it would be insane to let people upload their own avatars, like Steam does, for example)). It further broke down each category by alpha-numerics, making it easy to find a product by title. Finally, it had a nice search feature that used the PS3’s generic on-screen keyboard. Like I said, the old PlayStation Store was decent – none of these features are spectacular, nor are any of them revolutionary or above-and-beyond anything to be found on Xbox Live, WiiWare, Steam, Origin, or any other digital service.

How could Sony screw-up something so basic? The new PlayStation Store puts emphasis on NEW, NEW, NEW to the detriment of all else, thanks to a changing “Featured Title,” categories for “Hot on PS3” and “New on PS3,” as well as an option for lemmings with no opinions of their own to download the same things as everyone else through a “Most Downloaded” category. Of course, for those who want to do things in Pre-Social-Media-Style, the new PlayStation Store still includes discrete categories for PS3 Games, PS3 Add-Ons, PS3 Demos, PS3 Themes, Avatars, and Media… yet each of these categories also pops-out a huge menu of sub-items with “Hot,” “New,” and “Top” listings for each. But the menus themselves, which now dwell on the left-hand side of the screen, must not be good enough at selling the NEW, NEW, NEW, so each one also brings up a glob of garish graphics that I can only describe as “advertisements” for “Hot,” “New,” and “Top” that fill up the rest of the screen.

Upon digging down far enough through layers of menus and promotional advertisements, a persistent PlayStation Store shopper will eventually find the products they are interested in – in my case, I only ever care about PSN Games and Add-Ons. Yet, unlike the old PlayStation Store, the new one doesn’t allow shoppers to jump to a specific letter in the huge list of available products. Instead, shoppers are presented with a list of EVERYTHING in that category, sorted by default in reverse chronological order. If someone doesn’t know when a product was released, there are other sorting options available, but even something as simple as alphabetical requires lots and LOTS of scrolling… and loading… and scrolling… and loading to find a specific title.

So instead of scrolling and loading and scrolling some more, why wouldn’t a savvy shopper just search for the title they want? Well, that would be due to the fact that Sony completely ruined the search box by re-using the awful system that first appeared in the PS3 YouTube app. Instead of bringing up the standard PS3 on-screen keyboard, the search function now brings up a huge, vertical, white-text-on-black-background list of every character in the Latin alphabet which must be scrolled through by pressing up and down on the d-buttons or left stick. After selecting a single letter, the system starts trying to guess what the shopper is searching for and begins to fill-up the right half of the screen with completely worthless results, similar to the unpopular Google Instant Search, but even more annoying, as Google Instant at least waits until it has enough of a word to make something resembling an educated guess.

As if the horrible new interface and worthless new search functionality weren’t bad enough, the new PlayStation Store seems even slower and more sluggish than the old store. PSN doesn’t exactly have a good reputation for being speedy. I’ve read plenty of anecdotes and experienced first-hand how much longer it takes to download something from PSN than it does through other e-shops. Yet now even the shop interface is sluggish and laggy. According to Nick’s theory of the new PlayStation Store as an anti-hacking move, it’s possible that the new store is slower because every single piece of it is stored server-side. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. However, combining the experiences of several MeltedJoystick members and staff paints a picture of a PlayStation Store that is laggy regardless of connection speed, ranging from blazingly-fast 20Mbps to my own humble 1.5Mbps “best effort.” If the new store’s issues were caused by moving its resources from the PS3 to Sony’s servers, I would expect to feel the impact more than others, which has not been the case. My own completely unsubstantiated theory as to why the new PlayStation Store is so sluggish is that it’s straining the limited RAM in the console. Sony already had to hack-in support for in-game access to the Cross Media Bar, Bethesda Softworks has had difficulties in getting “Skyrim” and its DLC to work properly on the PS3 due to a RAM shortage… it would make sense that a new shop with new graphics and an obsession with displaying a whole bunch of irrelevant crap on-screen at once would start to bump-up against the ceiling of that 256MB of RAM and 256MB of VRAM.

Regardless of the reasons, the new PlayStation Store is an eyesore and a hindrance that makes it more difficult to shop on PSN. While I have always been dubious about buying digital downloads and DLC from Sony, making the process more difficult instead of easier just gives me another excuse not to bother with DLC and to buy multi-platform digital games on a different platform. Of course, this late in the game, with Generation 7 getting ready to usher-in the Baby NewYear of the WiiU while the Father Time Twins of the PS3 and Xbox 360 shuffle off into the sunset, I don’t know if it really matters if Sony screws up the PS3’s online shop. The PS3 will go offline before too long, and the burden of supporting a good online marketplace will fall upon the shoulders of the Vita (LOL) and/or whatever the PS4/Orbis turns out to be. Hopefully by the time that happens, Sony will have scrapped this current horrible PlayStation Store interface and have replaced it with something snappy, uncluttered, and easy-to-use. Of course, it may not matter at all.