Balanced Brawl

You may or may not of heard of Balanced Brawl, but it's an impressive, FREE project made with the mission of balancing Super Smash Bros. Brawl (duh). Anyway, I downloaded it tonight and got it up and running in under 30 minutes, 95% of which was spent on my computer getting the SD card ready (All you need is an SD card; no hacking or Homebrew Channel required, and it won't keep you from being able to play standard Brawl). I've played around with it a little bit (just against AI opponents), and I can testify that it was really easy to set up. Just follow the instructions here. Hurry up, too, before Nintendo shuts it down or releases a patch that disables it. Hopefully they won't do that because this is no way shape or form causes them to make any less money, but who knows. It is Nintendo's right to make sure Captain Falcon blows nut sack.

The downside is that the way it works is by going through the Stage Builder, and a casualty of that is that you can no longer have custom stages. That makes me a sad panda. It's definitely worth it though (I hope) because if I can actually be competitive with Yoshi, I'll be able to get over the fact that I can't play on Wally McSpinzor anymore. Once I really sink my teeth into it, I'll be sure to report my impressions. I will say this, though, this is definitely still Brawl, so don't expect to start wave-dashing or L-canceling any time soon.

--Chilly P

p.s. I did go to the site to ask around about getting my custom stages to work, and there apparently is a work around, but you need the Homebrew Channel, which I have but don't trust. Anyway, if you can get into a chat with the Thinkaman, he can help you out.