New Super Mario Bros. Wii/Unused Level Features
This is a sub-page of New Super Mario Bros. Wii.
Some of the levels in New Super Mario Bros. Wii have, interestingly, a lot of testing and unused features.
Contents
Unused Stages
World 7-Tower
| Early | Final |
|---|---|
 |
 |
The file for Coin-1 (only accessible in Coin Battle mode) includes an unfinished version of the final area from World 7-Tower. It's missing many objects and coins and also has several layout changes. A full list of differences is present at the Notes page.
Super Mario Bros. 1-1
The file for Coin-2 (a level which is a wacky version of World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros.) includes a version of the original bonus room, but there's no way to access it from the overworld. There's lots of coins attached to a spinning controller. The reason for removal is probably that the pipe which was supposed to lead into this area had a star coin put into it, and it glitches now when you enter it.
World 1
Title Screen
The title screen stage has the horizontal-wrap flag enabled, which is otherwise only ever used in the first room of Coin-1. This zone is wide enough that the characters never reach the edge before the attract mode activates, so the flag has no effect.
It's possible that the title screen stage was intended to continue indefinitely by wrapping. The horizontal-wrap flag is very fragile, though, and only works with specific zone positions and widths. This results in very glitchy behavior in this stage, demonstrated with hacks on the right, rather than a smooth wrap.
World 1-1
1-1 includes a single blank tile (colored red here for visibility) far to the southeast of the accessible underground bonus areas.
World 1-Tower
There's a single tile located to the left of the zone in 1-Tower.
Ambush Levels
All the ambush levels in this world feature an unused location with ID 0 covering the whole zone. They were possibly attached to the ambush controller in the past, but they aren't used now, nor are they found in any other world's ambush stages.
World 2
World 2-2
2-2 has several unused entrances spread around. IDs 4, 8...
...and 32 in Area 1...
...and ID 0 in Area 2.
The sky bonus rooms contains three unused locations (IDs 1, 5 and 6), likely used in the past for cloud effects. Nothing is attached to them.
World 2-3
To continue the trend, 2-3 has an unused entrance with ID 3 in the final zone.
World 2-Tower
2-Tower has an unused entrance as well, with ID 0 in Area 4. Both Area 1 and 4 also feature a bunch of the unused tower tiles far below the zones.
World 2-4
2-4 has yet another unused entrance with ID 14 in the second part of the level.
World 3
World 3-1
3-1 has two unused locations inside the first two pipes, with IDs 5 and 6...
...and it also has an unused entrance with ID 32 in the second portion of the level, beneath the last red coin.
World 4
World 4-1
4-1 has a load of coins underneath the zone.
World 4-Castle
4-Castle's bonus room for Star Coin 3 has an unused rotation controller on top of the star coin, configured to slowly spin 90 degrees clockwise when flag ID 1 is enabled. There are no rotation-controllable sprites in the zone, and the only thing there capable of activating flags is the star coin itself (and it's not configured to).
There's a rotation controller used in the other bonus zone to the left of this one, but it's unlikely that this is an accidental copy-paste of that, because the two have completely different settings.
World 5
World 5-1
5-1 has a lone Red Koopa Troopa located underneath the zone.
World 5-Tower
5-Tower's boss battle room has some unreachable platforms above it.
World 5-Castle
5-Castle has four pairs of unused paths with lots of nodes bunched up in vertical lines. They're difficult to visualize like this, so in the images that follow, they've been spread out horizontally for clarity's sake.
The path controller actors that are still attached to some of them are configured to loop. It seems likely that they were originally used to control this level's vertically moving chain-link fences, which in the final game move on their own instead.
The first two sets of paths aren't near any of the fences, but the third and fourth are, suggesting that some fences that used to exist near the beginning of the level were replaced with the rotating fence wheels seen there in the final version.
At the start of the area are these two paths that go up and down by four tiles, with some easing. The fences in the final game don't have any easing, so they may have looked a little nicer when they used these paths.
These are similar, but only move by two tiles.
These paths would produce a unique step-wise motion. They would correspond to what were ultimately the first set of vertical fences in the final level.
The paths here, which use easing again, suggest that these fences originally moved eight tiles, rather than just three as in the final version.
Another unused feature in this level is that 6 of the 9 of the giant rotating chain-link wheels have rotation controllers at their centers, even though the actor rotates on its own in the final game. Two of them are used to rotate the giant metal bars near the end of the level, but the other 4 are unused. This could mean either that the wheels originally used rotation controllers, or that there were originally more of the giant bars (which would've made the level much more difficult).
World 6
World 6-1
6-1 has seven coins located underneath the zone that are completely unreachable.
World 6-2
6-2 has two unused entrances. Entrance 7 is located right near the start of the level and leads to Entrance 0 in area 3....
...and the other, with ID 0, is located near the end of the level and leads to itself.
World 7
World 7-6
7-6 has a small unused sprite location underneath the zone, with ID 17. No sprite is assigned to it.
World 8
World 8-7
8-7 has an unused autoscroll path for both zones. It mostly seems to follow the level design, but it's way too fast in certain spots for the bonecoaster to catch up and is completely wrong just before the end of the first zone, which indicates that the level was different there. The autoscroll sprite and event activation sprites are still in the level, but the events don't match so the autoscroller never starts.
World 8-Castle
The final castle level has a bunch of tiles outside of the first zone...
...and a whole bunch more outside of the midpoint room.
World 9
World 9-8
9-8 also has an unused entrance, with ID 1.
World 12
World 12-66
One of the functions related to camera movement (see 8007b37c in the PAL v1 build) has unique behavior if the current level is 12-66, area 2. There are no level files for any worlds beyond 9, so this level doesn't actually exist. Still, if a level with this specific name were to be loaded in multiplayer mode, instead of the usual gradual zoom-out as the players move away from each other, the camera would zoom out as far as possible as soon as the players spread out at all.
