The Spiffing Brit
is a British gaming YouTuber who specializes in showcasing and exploiting various bugs and exploits in video games for the hilarity it would cause. If there's something broken in a game, you'll be sure he'll find it and cheese the heck out of it for giggles, all the while drinking a cup of Yorkshire Tea.
His portfolio however starts remarkably mundane, in that his early videos explored the lore of Stellaris. Due to the long periods in between updates, he eventually branched out to video game exploits, and the rest is history.
Contains examples of:
- The Ace: One Hundred Stat Man, in every iteration.
- And I Must Scream: He pulls off an absolutely nightmarish The Sims 4 exploit where he traps a group of pregnant women in a pool and forces them to give birth over and over. Basically, because it's impossible for children and pregnant women to die in the game, they can never drown, and because they're in a pool they can never actually give birth. However, the game still gives you a free bassinet when they go into labor, meaning you can rack up an infinite number of bassinets and sell them all for 150 Simoleons each. Of note it's one of the few times he expresses doubt over doing something while fully leaning into his greedy madman persona. Spiff Lampshades it:The Spiffing Brit: More like "I have no energy, and I must swim."
- Art Evolution: In earlier videos the comedy involved crude drawings mixed with stock figures from Shutterstock. As the channel took off, those drawings improved drastically and the stock photos became a mix of those same photos but with a channel-themed watermark, fanart, and drawings of those stock characters but as a man in a top hat and suit.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Inverted in his victory speech for winning Game Of life 2 where he declares "This [his fabulous wealth] proves that anyone can make it with enough grit, determination and cheating".
- Awesome, but Impractical: Mega Train. A 32km long high speed train with far more seats than there were people in the region built simply because Spiff wanted to blow several billion dollars on the longest possible train he could make before it crashed his computer.
- Brits Love Tea:
- He reminds viewers to have a nice, warm cup of tea (preferably Yorkshire) with them while watching as he games the system. In his Age of Empires III video, he remarked that for the hot 30°C summer weather, iced tea would be permitted just this once.
- He has even done a tier list of various tea brands. Not surprisingly, he puts the Yorkshire Tea brands towards the top, especially Yorkshire Gold at S-tier. Inversely, he put sweetened ice teas (after an indignant rant), Bovril (a beef and yeast paste submitted at the request of a superchat viewer) and Lancashire Tea (which he was not impressed with at all) in the F-tier.
- Butt-Monkey: Connorbrow. If he's not been invited to be an accomplice to an exploit, it's a guarantee Spiff is going to humiliate him with it.
- Captain Ersatz / Bland-Name Product: Whenever Hello, [Insert Name Here] is involved, he'll often go for something well known but with a changed letter or two, the most famous of all being Reanu Keeves. There's also Bario the Despoiler, Dosneyland, Shrak, Fallout 77, Captain Jock Sparrow and Will Smoth the Genie.
- Curb-Stomp Battle:
- While in the Yogscast Jingle Jam 2020 Live Stream, he ends up with a huge profit lead over everyone else in OpenTTD.
- Also his general style is making as many of these as possible in the games he exploits. If it's not part of the exploit he'll either throw in ways to do it to go faster or go on a tangent to also show the watcher how to do it as well as the main subject.
- While in the Yogscast Jingle Jam 2020 Live Stream
- Curse Cut Short: By We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: For The Sims 4, when still working on a death room for one family of Sims, his Sim (Lord Farquaad) tried making a grilled cheese sandwich:The Spiffing Brit: Oh, look at Farquaad here, tending to his food at night. Isn't he a happy little man? He just leveled up to Level 3 cooking. (stove catches fire) Oh no, he started a fire! Oh god, okay! (Farquaad catches fire) Oooooooh, sh- (the "Please Stand By" test card appears, with an 8-bit variation of Spanish Flea playing)
- Didn't Think This Through:
- He quickly regretted the decision to make it so that every time someone died in his 100 Prisoners in 100 Days Challenge, their body would burst into flames. As he also occupied his prison with exclusively super-strong, super-tough and super-aggressive legendary inmates. A single one of which is capable of killing entire groups of guards single-handedly even without a weapon conjured almost out of thin air.
- One where The Spiffing Brit didn't notice: In the RollerCoaster Tycoon video "No Exit Challenge", Spiff uses the old No Entry banner at the park entrance/exit trick, to prevent guests from leaving. The problem is that the guest count for the park is usually dependent on park ratings, ride availability, value, awards, and marketing, whereas guests are commonly cycled through to provide the park with a steady source of income. Trapping the guests not only sends the park rating plummeting (because the guests will get "lost and cannot find the park exit"), the guests will not be motivated to go on any more rides once they've decided to leave the park, and this also prevents the guests who want to leave from being replaced by new guests with a fresh wallet and an eagerness to go on your rides. Indeed, this is exactly what happens in the "No Exit Challenge", but the rock-bottom ratings that's visible on the screen are conveniently ignored in the video.
- Parodied in his Age of Wonders 4 video, which was sponsored by the developers. Spiff jokes that the developers were expecting him to just play the game in a "balanced" way, whereas he is going to do his normal shtick of exploiting the game six ways from Sunday.
- Even Evil Has Standards: As much as he makes a name as a professional exploiter of video games. He refuses to show off exploits in MMOs and other online-only games because it will very likely lead to someone getting banned by the developers of the game in question and he would have had a hand in that.
- Evil Brit: Played for Laughs in most cases. Casually admitting more than once his love of video games keep him from becoming some kind of supervillain. Lampshaded with his "IRL infinite money exploit"; a hypothetical Kickstarter-funded theme park no one can leave because a one-way "no entry" sign on the inside of the park entrance requires breaking the rules to leave. And no one would want to break the rules would they?SB: "Oh god I'm evil."
- The Faceless: Only on his channel. Averted when he streams with the members of Yogscast.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: "X but with too many mods". Instead of showing off an exploit, he gives his admin free rein to fill a game with mods they find on the Steam Workshop without him knowing what they have found. And he jumps into the game completely blind... Like discovering a "Sanic" race option in Skyrim that plays Sanic's theme whenever the character moves forward. These are some of the few videos where Spiff becomes completely out of his element.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In his Skyrim videos he says that his character, Reanu Keeves is so powerful that he risks breaking out of the game and into reality. He advises pledging your allegiance to Reanu Keeves as it will yield benefits like him taking you to a nice dinner, or just not killing you with his shouting power.
- Good Bad Bugs: Is not above using these to break a game. In one Stardew Valley video, he performed a (now patched) bug that let him infinitely clone items (in this case, a potato) to get tens of thousands of gold at the start of the game.
- I Lied: After showing three exploits in his Age of Wonders 4 video, a title card appears saying that "no more exploits were needed". This is immediately contradicted with a giant "I LIED" sign and another exploit.
- Not the Intended Use: A common shtick is to demonstrate how to exploit the gameplay system and achieve his goals using unorthrodox and creative ways. Examples include running a tree farm rather than a prison in Prison Architect, or achieving the Fortune aspiration in The Sims 4 by being adopted in other Sims' houses, killing said Sims and selling off all their property before moving on to a new location.
- Parody Commercial: Midpoint breaks frequently take the form of an advert for what's involved in the video. Such as an offer for the Bland-Name Product, an invitation to the dystopia he just built, or passing on An Offer You Can't Refuse from the character he is playing.
- Precision F-Strike: He normally doesn't swear in any of his videos but when it's a live stream, all bets are off as the swears come right out.
- Quintessential British Gentleman: Very British, right down to comparing various situations in his gameplay videos to moments in the British Empire's history.
- Sympathy for the Devil: Sometimes Spiff feels sorry for the various NPCs he victimizes with his exploits. While playing Peglin, and making his character an invincible demi-god who kills enemies by looking at them; Spiff tells the knights manning the ballista that he respects them and thinks they're doing an important job, even though their efforts are meaningless and they are going to die.
- Toll Booth Antics: One run for Cities: Skylines has him run a "city" entirely consisting of a series of tollbooths, purely making a profit out of this without having to pay for other services. When cars try going on other highways, or people instead opt to take trains instead, he has those severed so that everyone would have to pay tens if not hundreds of dollars worth of toll to go from one end to the other. With infrastructure and power expenses factored in, he would earn close to $10000 a week that way.
- He later pulls similar antics in Tropico, where he puts down dozens of toll booths and gives everyone on the island a free car, then lowers the salary for the toll workers and jacks up the price of the tolls to maximize profit.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Loves his tea, specifically the Yorkshire Gold brand, and will let you know about it any chance he gets. On the other side of things, he hates coffee, and avoids growing or taking it if it's for reasons other than destroying it or keeping it from other people.
- He also has a soft spot for gin. Or as he calls it according to Why my Youtube Channel got Deleted, "spicy tea"
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Seems to emphasize making NPCs suffer in order to profit.
- He makes money as Lord Farquaad in The Sims 4 by getting adopted into the richest Sim family. He then proceeds to drown everyone except Farquaad in a pool before selling off everything they owned. He repeats this process throughout the entire neighborhood.
- In this Prison Architect video, he suppresses all his prisoners and refuses to attend to their needs, all in the pursuit of profit. He nearly gets arrested in-game for criminal negligence.
- In this Tropico 6 video, he has everyone except a few guards and the tourist's kids arrested and made to work on his island for a long period of time after both manipulating external factors and setting up his island constitution to allow him to do so consequences-free.
- In this Cities: Skylines video, he made everyone in the city drink sewage to get them sick in order to profit off both the rising healthcare and the deathcare stock market.
- Violation of Common Sense: How many of his exploits go. Such as transporting coal by air because the price of a good in Transport Fever goes up the further it travels, and the faster it reaches destination B, the less maintenance costs eat into the margins. He was paid several million for what he estimated to be £34,000 worth of coal in real life terms because he happened to ship it by jet from the other side of a very large map.
- We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: For The Sims 4, when still working on a death room for one family of Sims, his Sim (Lord Farquaad) tried making a grilled cheese sandwich:SB: Oh, look at Farquaad here, tending to his food at night. Isn't he a happy little man? He just leveled up to Level 3 cooking. (stove catches fire) Oh no, he started a fire! Oh god, okay! (Farquaad catches fire) Oooooooh, sh- (the "Please Stand By" test card appears, with an 8-bit variation of Spanish Flea playing)
