Important Disclaimer: Many of the projects below require running homebrew code on your Wii in some fashion. This info is presented as-is, and both I the author and Gamers Daily News disclaim any liability. I assume you either already know how to do this with your Wii, or can find out on your own; I won’t help you with it for a variety of reasons, among them that improper use of homebrew can render your Wii into a useless, unplayable ’brick.’ You act on any info provided here at your own risk. Additionally, acting on this info and using the materials below almost certainly voids your Wii’s warranty; you have been warned.

Depending on who you speak with, Smash Bros. Brawl is either a fantastic party fighting game, or a poor competitive fighter that could become great with some tweaking. Toward that end, a few projects have sprung up in the hopes of making it better for the latter group. I want to stress up front, this is not "Fox vs. Marth only, chaingrabs and wavedashing only, Final Destination only, fun is banned." They’re expressly not trying to make Melee 2.0, and both the Brawl+ and Balanced Brawl projects have flat-out rejected wavedashing. Even if you don’t try these projects, I think you’ll be fascinated by the lengths fans are going to for modding this game.

Brawl+ (aka "Brawl Plusery"): A hack with several goals, Brawl+ attempts to fix some bugs in the normal game while also speeding up gameplay, giving characters more movement options so that defensive and projectile oriented tactics do not dominate like they tend to in normal Brawl. Additionally, numerous changes have been made to characters; examples include Meta Knight’s fast and powerful down-smash attack losing some of its ability to easily kill foes (he already has tons of other advantages) and making it easier to land Zelda’s powerful ’lightning kicks.’ Other spiffy changes include a customizable frame buffer, which bears explaining. Normal Brawl has a ’ten frame buffer’, where you can input a move as late as ten frames of animation before it would be legal to do the move, and your character will do it as soon as they can. An example of this is doing Ike’s jabs near the edge of the stage; if he gets knocked off in the middle of his jabs, he may do his ’neutral aerial’ attack instead and kill himself due to the buffer. In Brawl+, you can change your buffer to be anywhere from 0 to 10 frames, making your controls more precise or lenient as you prefer.

Brawl+ also improves the character selection screen, and as a side project may add new characters. There are limitations on what they can do with that, and none of the new characters are currently officially part of Brawl+, but seem to be well received nonetheless. The most advanced of these at this time is probably Roy, who you may know from Smash Bros. Melee or Fire Emblem: Sealed Sword. He currently overwrites Marth (but does play genuinely differently from him), though they have plans to add him as a truly new character with traits all his own.

Links: Please note both of these projects are currently works in progress, which means a few bugs may crop up if you try them out.
Brawl+ Website ||| Roy For Brawl+