The Nintendo 3DS is quite the powerful little machine. If you’ve seen it running Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D or Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition, you’ll know that it’s a very capable machine when it comes to pushing polygons. To prove just how powerful the 3DS is, Ubisoft Montreal, developers of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell 3DS says that they were “able to run the Unreal engine on this console console, which is pretty impressive for a handheld machine, and the 3D doesn’t affect the performance.” Does that mean the 3DS can produce games on par with the iPhone and iPad’s Infinity Blade that uses Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 technology? Uh, no. Epic’s Mark Rein quickly went around to do a little crowd control, revealing that Ubisoft Montreal was actually using the old Unreal Engine 2 on the 3DS. Earlier this month at GDC 2011, Rein told the press that if Epic felt the 3DS could run the Unreal Engine 3, his company would be all over it. So as impressive as 3DS titles will look, they’ll still be a hair behind in the graphic wars, but then again, Nintendo’s video game systems have always been underpowered in that department and they’ve all done just fine, with the exception of the N64 and GameCube. Graphics matter, but so does gameplay. What good is a pretty game if it doesn’t control well?
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