balanced-brawl
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Unofficial Smash Bros. Brawl rebalancing update released
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]
Fans rewrite Brawl to balance characters
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a pretty fun fighting game to play with friends, right?WRONG. It's actually an unbalanced mess. At least, that's what a group of Smash Boards members seems to believe, seemingly with more conviction than we've ever had for pretty much anything. It's important enough that they decided to patch the game's code to change specific gameplay elements. "Balanced Brawl" has three goals, as stated by the coders: first, to remove "infinites" and "inescapable lockdowns" (simple, unblockable combos that add more than 50% damage), increase overall character balance, and increase stage viability.You can see examples of the kind of minute tweaking done to the characters in the chart above, and you can read way, way more about each change in the Smash Boards thread. It's a pretty impressive testament to just how much time has been spent thinking about Brawl.
