If you played through the game without warping, you should have gone to Level 9... otherwise, no.

Also, once you beat 8-4 eight times, you will be able to access Levels A-D by hitting A + Start on the title screen.

Murdar Machene wrote:

Is that what the stars on the title screen mean? Also, does this have a save system or did some sick fuck just expect kids to leave their NES on their whole life?

Yes, that is what the stars mean. And yes, the game did have a save feature of sorts. See, the Japanese version of SMB2 wasn't technically an NES game. It was released on the Famicom Disk System, which was a peripheral for the Famicom, the Japanese equivalent of the NES. It came out in 1986 and it's hardware wasn't quite as powerful as the NES and it used writable floppy disks. So every time you beat SMB2, it permanently wrote to the disk adding a star to your title screen. I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think there was any way to get rid of them once you had them. I don't know why you'd want to, but I don't think you actually could.

(edited because I mixed up some stuff about the Famicom and FDS while half-asleep)

The funny thing is though, the FDS was still inferior to the NES. Games such as Doki Doki Panic and Zelda 2 which debuted on the FDS were actually BETTER on the NES. For example, the cascading water on waterfalls and rotating letters on POW blocks that can be seen in America's SMB2 do not exist in Doki Doki Panic; instead you have stationary POW letters and water that runs in a super fast two-frame animation.

Yeah, they were cheaper than cartridges, which was the advantage. Unfortunately, Nintendo made two major mistakes with it. First, the FDS are unreliable. The drive belts are badly made and are prone to breaking. Secondly, the disks were proprietary and Nintendo demanded partial copyright on all games released on FDS, thus making it very unappealing to developers. So once companies figured out how to use battery packs on NES carts, the game support for the FDS quickly dropped off.