The Spiffing Brit

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Hello, ladies and gents. I'm the Spiffing Brit, and I break video games for a living.

—"AGE OF WONDERS 4 IS A PERFECTLY BALANCED GAME WITH NO EXPLOITS - Everything Is Broken"

The Spiffing Brit is a YouTuber who specializes in finding exploits and Good Bad Bugs in games (and occasionally other systems, including YouTube itself) which can be used to gain outrageous advantages in play. While he is skilled at identifying combinations of features which produce unexpected advantageous effects, he also welcomes and showcases exploits discovered by others. His videos tend to focus on demonstrating the results of using these exploits, mostly in RPGs and real-time strategy games, and usually humorously, but with simple (or iconic) enough exploits he will take the time to demonstrate on-screen how to invoke or activate them.

He does all this in the persona of a Quintessential British Gentleman, embracing every possible British stereotype from a Spot of Tea and worship of the late Queen Elizabeth to rampant colonialism.

The Spiffing Brit joined the Yogscast in 2019.

His YouTube channel can be found here.

Compare GrayStillPlays.

The Spiffing Brit provides examples of the following tropes:
  • Acceptable Targets: Todd Howard of Bethesda Games is the frequent target of Spiff's mockery, usually disguised as effusive praise for a bug-free and perfectly balanced game. Spiff has also appropriated Howard's infamous line "It just works" for highlighting particularly broken combinations of features or misfeatures.
  • Animated Adaptation: Two so far:
  • Aside Glance: He uses several stock images that function as this since he never appears on-camera.
  • Author Avatar: A top-hatted, monocle-wearing Quintessential British Gentleman with a Badass Mustache, usually holding a cup of tea. Sometimes seen in armor, sometimes in a suit, and sometimes as a stick figure based on a classic "rage face" meme.
  • Blatant Lies: Any video title taking the form "<Game> Is A Perfectly Balanced Game With No Exploits".
  • Catch Phrases:
    • "Just sit right back, make sure you have a warm cup of tea in hand, and watch as we <do something obscene to a game>."
    • "It just works."
    • "It really is that easy."
    • "...Spicy..."
    • "...Majestic..."
    • "...you lovely sausages..."
    • "It's perfectly balanced."
    • "Beans."
    • "Wa-bam!"
    • "With the power of Yorkshire Gold!"
  • Cultural Posturing: Spiff is almost always attributing various "advantages" (such as a lack of a moral compass) to his obvious superior British nature. (See the Quotes subpage for a couple examples.)
  • Designated Evil: Coffee drinkers.
  • Drink Order: Yorkshire Tea. And only Yorkshire Tea.
  • Fan Nickname: "The Time-lapse Guy", for earlier video content in which he provided commentary on grand strategy games run in time-lapse.
  • Fake Upper-Class Brit: Although his online persona is supposed to be an upper-class British gentleman, his use of Received Pronunciation is spotty at best, with elements of what seems to be an Estuary accent slipping through here and there.
  • Game Breaker: Explaining and demonstrating these are his stock in trade.
  • Gentleman Snarker
  • A God Am I: Or so he claims in his March 23, 2022 video, Impossible Game VS Pro Exploiter.
  • Gonk: His preferred aesthetic when creating characters in games that allow you to customize your appearance.
  • High-Class Glass: His avatar. The page image could practically be his avatar.
  • Humans Are Their Own Precursors: This is the underlying conceit of the civilization Spiff played in a Stellaris game livestreamed under the title Space Warcrime Simulator - British Empire In Stellaris Live! (WHAT COULD GO WRONG!??!) on February 12, 2023: a lost human colony that collapsed not long after its founding, which has after some unknown period regained civilization and primitive starflight capability. Amusingly, late in the stream Spiff's civilization re-encounters the civilization that originally sent the colony ship out — and they're not terribly impressed with him.
  • I Love the Smell of X In the Morning: In his more martial videos, Spiff has been known to declare "I love the smell of war crimes in the morning."
  • Knight Fever: Spiff has bought several noble titles from the Principality of Sealand, usually as a strange incentive for viewers to add "likes" to his videos. And as part of an early 2021 video he has acquired several square feet of land in Scotland, which by Scottish law and custom allegedly makes him a lord.
  • Lethal Joke Item: Has made several videos about how to create such items in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim out of ordinary utensils like the common fork and fishing rods.
  • Nice Hat: His avatar's topper.
  • Not the Way It Is Meant to Be Played: As far as Spiff is concerned, that's the only way to play a game.
  • Oop North: Spiff has indicated on occasion that he is from the north of Great Britain.
  • Philosopher's Stone: Not in a literal sense, but a figurative. One of Spiff's favorite kinds of exploit is the "infinite money cheat", where an unusual set of player set-up decisions at game start and/or an unexpected chain of actions during play results in far more money than the developers ever expected anyone to make. Spiff is also noted for discovering such exploits involving real money during ill-conceived promotions on sites like Microsoft, Steam, Twitch and Amazon.com.
  • Playful Hacker: Essentially takes this role for video games and YouTube itself. He usually doesn't alter code itself, but rather uncovers and employs unexpected behaviors or implications in the user interface.
    • And as befits a Playful Hacker, he reveals the exploits he finds in websites like YouTube for the express purpose of motivating their owners to fix them.
  • Product Placement: Thoroughly averted, although not by choice. Spiff would really love it if Yorkshire Tea chose to sponsor him.
  • Quintessential British Gentleman: Spiff's online persona.
  • Reaction Shot: Most of his stock images take the place of reaction shots.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: Several of his avatar images, as well as a few of his other stock images, have alternate versions with blazing red laser eyes to indicate that he's getting dangerous.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: Spiff demonstrates a verbal variety, frequently misreading or mispronouncing words one would expect to be common or well-known.
  • Running Gag: "Reanu Keeves", Keanu Reeves' "beautiful cousin", a grotesque figure Spiff recreates in every game where he has the option of controlling the player character's appearance.
  • Sarcasm Mode: His online persona's default personality.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money: Spiff points out that this is inherent in practically every roleplaying game, open-world or not, and is one of the reasons that he pursues infinite-money exploits.
  • Sequence Breaking: Spiff has a fondness for exploiting the "open" part of open world games to vastly overpower starting-level characters by taking them to locations where they can acquire equipment the developers probably didn't expect anyone to get until much later in the game. He has demonstrated this in, among other games, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Elden Ring.
  • Spot of Tea: Practically every Spiffing Brit video extols the virtues of tea -- particularly Yorkshire brand tea -- while demonizing coffee drinkers.
  • Stock Footage: Spiff's videos are filled with a set of stock images, many if not most of which have a "SpiffCo" watermark applied to them. The regular viewer will come to associate many of these with certain catchphrases and behaviors.
    • In early 2021, some generous soul with the initials "RF" redid a number of the stock photos as artworks depicting the Spiffing Brit's avatar as their central figure.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial/Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Spiff's "disclaimers" presented immediately before he demonstrates how to exploit poor programming decisions on a website
  • The Teaser: Up until around 2021-22, most of his videos opened with a short five- to ten-second clip of a (usually) key moment from later in the video. It was usually an Action Prologue of some sort.
  • Unusual Euphemism: "Beans!" Uttered whenever he makes a mistake or something unexpected happens.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: In keeping with his professed love of "war crimes", Spiff often chooses the most... unfriendly options when he doesn't have another plan in play.
    • In his September 1, 2023 livestream of a playthrough of Starfield, when he discovered it was possible to destroy a Generation Ship that had arrived at a resort planet they had planned (200 years earlier) on colonizing, Spiff went out of his way to acquire all the perks and equipment he needed to force the ship's reactors to overload, then shot his way out of the ship, not only killing security forces but unarmed civilians and even attempting to murder the colonists' children.


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