Quake Advance?
Apparently it could be done
Although the GameBoy Advance wasn't really designed with 3D in mind, some developers have been meddling with pushing polygons on the hand-held. Some of the more impressive demonstrations of the GBA's capabilities we've seen to date have come from AGB Games, who have been working on their WFR 3D engine for some time now. The latest screenshots and movie footage to emerge from the developer show a modified version of the opening level from Quake running on the GBA, with AGB claiming it runs relatively smoothly at 15 to 60 frames per second. Obviously it's far from a pixel perfect conversion - the architecture has been simplified somewhat, the lighting looks more like Doom than Quake, and AGB need to work on their texture alignment skills. But the important thing is that the layout is instantly recognisable as the difficulty selection map from the beginning of Quake. Whether the engine is capable of recreating some of the more complex areas of Quake remains to be seen, and we're not sure exactly how you would go about effectively controlling a true 3D shooter with only four buttons and the D-pad at your disposal, but it does show that the GBA is capable of far more than the primitive flat-shaded polygons we've seen to date, and AGB are already talking about the possibility of creating 3D shooters and Wipeout-style racing games on the GameBoy.