Balanced Brawl: Like Brawl+, Balanced Brawl seeks to make the game more fair in competitive play. Far less extensive in its changes, Balanced Brawl makes few changes to the rules and physics of the game Nintendo has made. Instead, it seeks to make only a few specific changes to existing stages and characters in the hopes of keeping Brawl’s distinct feel but making it more fair. Some examples include making the bottom part of the Hyrule stage inaccessible to bar access to its "fight club/cave of life" where it is extremely hard to kill anyone, and of course some character rebalancing. About ten characters were left unchanged, while others lost their chaingrabs (a throw that combos into itself infinitely, and is unable to be avoided once the first throw hits), and others had a major part of their gameplay changed. For example, Link’s arrows now deal significant knockback in some cases, making them useful to keep opponents off-stage; it makes up for the fact he has major trouble recovering if knocked off himself.

Links: This project is also a work in progress: Balanced Brawl

Texture Hacks: Purely a visual change, many people have begun making their own textures (’skins’ might be another term for it) to use in Brawl. Some of these simply recolor a character to their liking, while others make the character appear to be someone else. The texture generally has to fit the model, though some changes can be made in a few cases. Examples of this sort of thing include making Captain Falcon look like Viewtiful Joe, Zelda like Micaiah (from Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn), and Ike like Crono. Note that these are only visual changes; ’Crono Ike’ still plays exactly like Ike, and so on. How convincing these textures are tends to wildly vary; some look almost perfect, others are obviously as good as could be done with major limitations, and some admittedly are terrible. Due to the sheer variety of textures out there, I’m afraid I have no links to offer. That said, it’s not just character textures; there are also some clever texture hacks that change how stages look, and even some funny replacements for those ridiculous Wiimote strap warning screens.

It’s my hope that these projects at least made you say "Huh, interesting," even if you don’t use them. If you do plan to use them, I have one last important warning: using Brawl+, Balanced Brawl, or any other hack, benign or not, can get you banned from wi-fi play. These are thus mostly useful for offline play with friends, though reports do admittedly vary as to how safe they are to use online.

Finally, a very quick look at some WiiWare releases coming up that may interest you.