Borrowed time
It is the 1930’s and you are a private eye called Sam Harlow. One day you’re sitting behind your desk resting a bit when you get an anonymous call telling you that ‘they want you dead’. Immediately after they hang up you see a shadow of a man darkening the window and it’s obvious that you better get out of here quick. Down in the alley a couple of thugs draw their guns and try to take you out, after you take care of the goons you get more info on what is happening and you find out that your ex-wive Rita has been kidnapped. Now you have to find out not only why but also find the ones responsible and gather the evidence to get them arrested.
Borrowed time is a textadventure and all of the actions can be typed in or you can use the mouse to click on standard actions on the screen. This is much less usefull than you’d think as most of the time it’s easier just to type them and sometimes clicking doesn’t get you the sentence you want. Also shown onscreen is a picture of your surroundings and your inventory, you can show only text if you want by pressing the enter button without typing a command. There is a tiny addition that all text adventures should have and that is that you can type in several commands in a row by seperating them with a dot (.) and this way you can get past scenes in the game you have already seen.
Borrowed time is a pretty good adventure game but there is one big annoying thing and that is there is a time limit throughout the game so if you take too long the thugs will find and kill you ending the game. This means you will have to start the game from scratch if you take too long and simply remember the things you have to do. Overall though it’s very enjoyable and I can recommend it to adventure fans especially those who like private eye stories.
Overal rating: 7.5/10
This game was released for several different systems here are some notes:
| Amiga | Released in 1985. Game has been tested but not completed with winUAE v0.9.91. Graphically the best compared to the others and loading times aren’t too bad. |
| C64 | Released in 1985. Game has been tested but not completed with CCS64 v2.0 win. The graphics are dithered like the DOS version but they can load quite slowly, luckily there is a turbo load option in the emulator. |
| DOS | Released in 1985. Game has been tested but not completed on a DOS PC. The intro runs much too fast but the rest of the game doesn’t have much of a problem. It doesn’t work on my win2k machine but it does run under DOSBOX v0.62. |
| Others | These versions are not available. Apple released in 1985. Atari ST released in 1985. |
| Date added | Mar-25-2005 19:06 |
| Name | Borrowed time |
| Developer | Interplay |
| Publisher | Activision |
| First released | 1985 |
| Genre | Interactive Fiction |
