Ubisoft says they've gotten the Unreal engine running on 3DS, discuss ease of development

A portion of a GameSpot UK interview with Ubisoft’s Fabrice Cuny…

GSUK: It’s been suggested that the 3DS has a similar level of processing power as the Wii. Is this the case in your experience?

FC: The 3DS is powerful, and we are able to run the Unreal engine on this console, which is pretty impressive for a handheld machine, and the 3D doesn’t affect the performance (thanks to my amazing programmers). The architecture is different compared to a Wii or some other platforms that we had to work with here at Ubisoft Montreal.

GSUK: One of the apparent benefits of the DS was that it was a very easy platform to develop for, with low costs making for a wide range of innovative games and strong third-party support. How does the 3DS compare?

FC: The 3DS can be much more comparable to a platform between a DSi and a Wii. We are able to create games anywhere from a puzzle game to very high-end game such as Splinter Cell 3D. The tools on the 3DS were brand new, and with every development phase, we had some tools with bugs and crashes. But with version after version, Nintendo provided us a set of tools and the support to help us debug and optimize the game.