Ace of Spades (video game)



Ace of Spades is a free, online, multiplayer First Person Shooter. To sum it up simply, it's what you might get if you were to cross Team Fortress 2's Capture the Flag mode (using a briefcase as the intel) and color coded teams with Minecraft's building blocks and boxy character models. It has a small, but dedicated, userbase.

By default, the game takes place on a large, randomly generated map with hills on Blue Team's side (west), and rivers on Green Team's side (east). You play as a member of one of these teams, with the choice of weapons between a rifle, a sub-machine gun or (as of v0.58) a shotgun. You other equipment consists of a spade (for removing and acquiring blocks), 50 blocks (for building), and three grenades. The point of the game is to capture the enemy's intelligence a certain number of times. You may change the color of the blocks you place by using the arrow keys to look through the pallet, or by right-clicking something else to sample it's color. A popular strategy is to build a foxhole in the side of a hill, using the same color blocks as the hill, and sniping in there with a rifle.

There is no kill-cam, so you do not know the location of your killer unless you manage to spot him before you fall.

The official website is located here, and there is a wiki here.

This game provides examples of:

 * Alien Sky: The Skybox can be set to a number of hues by server command, some of which are genuinely creepy. There are also scripts for a Minecraft-style day and night cycle and Disco Mode, the latter of which is now thoroughly depreciated.
 * Bizarrchitecture: Trying to get a pickup team of sixteen gamers to collaborate on building a large fortification with an enemy attack coming in every few minutes and often no voice-chat can result in some really weird-looking forts.
 * Boring but Practical: Simple buildings like bunkers and walls are easy to build and can act as effective barricades and sniper spots. The team with more of them often wins. More often than not, though, hastily-dug foxholes and trenches under fire will be what the player spends most of his time in.
 * Color Coded Multiplayer: Blue and Green.
 * Cool but Inefficient: Many, MANY of the buildings other players may build. They may be awesome sometimes, but rarely do they actually protect your intel or soldiers.
 * Cosmetically Different Sides
 * Death Is Not Permanent
 * Do Not Drop Your Weapon: Not even when you die.
 * Dronejam: In small doorways, players may have to wait turns.
 * Fixed as of 0.58 by making it possible to walk through other sprites.
 * Emergency Weapon: The entrenching tool can now be used for a One Hit Kill at melee ranges, an Ascended Mod of sorts since it was added by the third-party server software. Occasionally a source of frustration if Friendly Fire is switched on, because digging and attacking are performed with the same command and it's embarrassingly easy to accidentally deck a teammate.
 * Every Bullet Is a Tracer: Locating dug-in snipers would be very difficult otherwise.
 * Everything Breaks: Everything but the ground level.
 * Built With Lego
 * Everything Fades
 * Fast Tunnelling: For a given value of "fast", anyway. It's much faster than would be possible in real life, but tunnelling any distance will still take quite a while.
 * Fire Forged Friends: What happens with you and your teammates, if you're lucky.
 * The mod, Psyspades, adds squads. This, with many close encounters, firefights, and saving of lives, either makes you hate your squad, for respawning you in front of an enemy with a Smg or Shotgun, or trust them, where they snipe enemies who try to sneak up on you, heal you, and move with coordinated precision.
 * Floating Platforms: Generally averted, if you remove all the blocks under another, it will fall to the ground and vanish, but occasionally a glitch will leave a few in place.
 * However, if a structure spawns floating at the beginning of the map, it stays floating.
 * Follow the Leader: To Minecraft and (arguably) Team Fortress 2
 * Gaming Clan: Quite prominent. There are Major League Gamers, Bay 12ers, and *Color* Veterans.
 * Oh, and special mention must go to the bronies, one of the few clans to run their own server. Several clan members have named themselves after the "mane six" and naintain Kayfabe, and there's a word-substitution script that forces you to talk like a brony. It's still one of the better servers.
 * Game Mod: Mods can range from skins that revise weapons or iron sights, or make your character look like a Space Marine wielding a crossbow.
 * Green Hill Zone: One of the default maps in the original version.
 * Griefer: Rampant, usually centring around knocking down things other players have built. Occasionally, multiple griefers will join forces to demolish a particularly well-made structure, often displaying greater teamwork and coordination than anyone else on the server. Laying out blocks in the shape of giant male genitalia or obscene messages is another popular griefer pastime, and the game also attracts a genuinely alarming number of neo-Nazis.
 * The problem is a lot less acute now that bans are IP-based rather than nickname-based.
 * Guide Dang It: Its highly recommended to read or watch a guide before playing. Even changing certain game settings can take a while to figure out (edit config.ini in the game folder).
 * Hold the Line: Missions on some of the smaller and narrower maps frequently end up like this.
 * Hollywood Darkness: You will always be able to see, even in an enclosed space.
 * Invisible Anatomy: You can't see yourself.
 * Loads and Loads of Loading: Every server in early versions, a bit better now.
 * No Plot No Problem
 * Obvious Beta: The game takes simplicity to the extreme, with only five weapons (six, counting the spade), two official modes, and one kind of map, not counting user-created maps.
 * One Hit Kill: Shooting someone in the head is this.
 * The Points Mean Nothing: Players get points when they kill enemies and capture the enemy flag. They're only for bragging rights.
 * Blueshirt Army: and Greenshirt Army
 * Real Is Brown: Many of the more natural maps. Actually justified by the quasi-World War One aesthetic, as one can infer that the ground has been churned to mud by several years of Hopeless War.
 * Reality Ensues: For an FPS that looks like Minecraft, it actually turns out to be a relatively realistic war simulator.
 * Respawn Point: It shifts around a bit each time, but it's always on your team's side of the map.
 * Scenery Gorn: Whatever structures the mapper has set up at the start of the game will not be intact by the time the game is over.
 * Schizo Tech: The default graphics for the rifle are loosely based on a German semi-automatic rifle from the Second World War, the SMG is clearly a Heckler & Koch MP 5 and the shotgun and grenades could be from any era.
 * Actually considering the rifle is (supposedly) the M14, it's possibly even more Schizo because of the 1960s weapons... being used to fight First World War trench combat!
 * Short Range Shotgun: Averted. The shotgun in this game has a surprisingly realistic effective range.
 * Shotguns Are Just Better: It's decent range and ability to blow through blocks like a hot knife through butter make this trope even doubly so.
 * Sickening Crunch: When you take any damage at all.
 * Similar Squad: Identical except for uniform color.
 * Soft Water: Averted. Water is only one block deep and it will hurt if you fall in from too high up.
 * Standard FPS Guns: A rifle, a Submachine Gun, and a Shotgun, with a proper machine gun and sniper rifle to come.
 * Stealth Expert: You need to be this if you want to even see the enemy intel.
 * Stuff Blowing Up: Grenades
 * Taking You With Me: Some players opt to save their grenades for hopeless situations, when they'll toss them just before falling dead in hopes of killing their killer. Sometimes it works.
 * Unbreakable Weapons
 * Unusual User Interface: There's no ingame server browser, and in fact you don't load the game from the Start menu at all. Once the game is installed, players have to select a server from a list on the game's website, or type the aos:// address into their browser.
 * Videogame Caring Potential: Will you protect your intel and teammates with your life?
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: Or will you destroy your team's defenses and teamkill them?
 * Water Is Blue: Averted. It can any color of the rainbow.
 * War Is Hell: A common saying among the playerbase.
 * Wartime Cartoon: A few of them exist for the game, as well as propaganda for the two teams.
 * X Meets Y: Minecraft meets Team Fortress 2 meets World War One, World War II, and depending on the map, the Falkland Islands war.
 * Zerg Rush: Less experienced players often default to this. It seldom goes well.