The "Balanced Brawl" project, first announced in 2009, aimed to fix Super Smash Bros. Brawl by removing overpowered combos and exploitable moves and by altering individual characters to improve the competitive balance. It was an impressive project then, and it's been made even more impressive by the fact that you can make use of it in your own copy of the game right now -- without having to install the Homebrew Channel or permanently hack your Wii.

The development team has implemented a clever mechanism that loads the Balanced Brawl files from an SD card. You just have to download the files to a card (and remove all your saved custom Brawl stages), pop it in the system and launch the Stage Builder mode -- the loader will automatically take over from there. If you're interested in having a Balanced Brawl party, we suggest throwing one soon, before Nintendo releases a firmware update to block the unlicensed balancing act.

[Thanks, Kyle]