New Super Mario Bros. [Wii - Beta]

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a side-scrolling platform developed by Nintendo EAD and released in November 2009. The game was announced at E3 2009, and from the early videos and screens, Kirby64 was able to notice various beta differences:

• The propeller power-up was different from the final game.
• At the Nintendo Press Conference they said at the end of every stage a result screen will pop-up and show you how many enemies you stomp and how many coins you collected, but this only appear in the coin battle and free-for-all.
• The checkpoint flag was changed to bowser’s head at the final game and the background color of the flag was black. In the beta it had a skull.
• A music note / melody can be seen in the HUD.  That note is not in there in the final game.
• The blue arrow in the screen with the lava had changed its color in the final game (it’s red and the board is yellow).
• The world 5-3 background looks different from the final game.
• Some stages were removed or hevily changed in the final game.

In the screen with Mario in the pinguin-suit we can see an area that was originally going to be world 3-1, but it was later removed. The ice structure has a different design in the final version, with a more blue color and snow on top of the ice.

Some more info on the beta differences can be found at Mario Wiki:

In the E3 2009 demo, after players go through the boss door, they all fall from the top of the screen and into the boss room, as the initial Larry and Morton videos showed. This was just like in the original New Super Mario Bros., where the player also enters the Bowser Jr. battles the same way. In the final version, the players are already on the ground when the boss room loads up.

Kab-ombs, Mr. Blizzards, Stretches and Bowser Statues were meant to appear but they were cut out as soon as the game was released.

Also, LucaPM noticed a unused file in the NSMB Wii code, called “test_lift.arc”. As we can read at Rusted Logic, it is a graphic file, a stretched grey block.

Thanks to Kirby64 and LucaPM for the contributions!

Images:

Videos:

Edit