Universal Interactive Studios swung by the VGS office today with Running Wild (from developer Blue Shift), its racing game.

　　Set for release in March, the build we saw was 80 percent complete and looking good.

　　Players choose from six animal characters (bunny, zebra, elephant, ram, bull, and panda), then from six tracks (jungle, city, volcano, arctic, desert, moon). Running at 60fps in single-player mode, Running Wild makes footracing look incredibly fast and smooth. Up to four can play in split-screen mode, but the frame rate drops significantly (to 30fps in two-player, for example).

　　Players, however, have several options about how they wish to set up their multiplayer screens, one option being letterbox, which does the same thing a letterboxed movie does - allows for players to see the whole screen rather than cutting it to the small spilt-screen size and losing what happens along the edges, with black bits at the top and bottom.

　　Every world has a couple of alternative tracks in addition to the regular path. With the varying levels of difficulty and the bosses that players can open up after beating enough levels, there are a total of 15 layouts to race in five modes: challenge, circuit, time trials, practice race, and vs.

　　With music from the same composer who wrote Blue Shift's Disruptor's score, the game sounds good in addition to looking good.

　　Check out these screens.