Did any one get up to level Star-1 yet? Did you see the Zelda reference?
Just after the part where you ride Plessie (that big dinosaur type guy that belly surfs) there's a gate with two unlit torches. Just to the left of the gate is a hidden item box with a flower instead. Lite the torches and the gate opens to reveal a cloud cannon. It blasts you up to one of those platforms where you have to light up all the tiles, then the camera pans out and shows that it's a giant 8-bit sprite (there was a Mario one earlier in the game). This one is an 8-bit Link, and once you lite up the whole board it starts playing Zelda music. How fitting that you have to light the torches to get to this area, which is a common Zelda puzzle.
In level 1-2, there's an area that you need cat Mario to access. There's a red pipe, when you enter it you exit the level (with no flag pole) and travel all the way to the start of World 2. What's weird is if you collect a stamp or any green stars, you keep them, but the level will still show a Bowser flag. So I don't know if it counts toward any file completion percentage, or if finding all the secret warps is needed to get all the stars on your save file, but since there's one of them I figure there must be more of them. I know there wasn't any hidden/alt flag poles in 3D Land, and IIRC there weren't any world warps either.
