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Originally Posted by Metal Mario  SMB 2 was made in the days when you couldn't color Mario the way you wanted, so you had to make his mustache blue. New SMB Wii, on the other hand, exists in this modern age in which the ideal colors can be applied to the tiniest detail. |
There were ways around that. Nintendo being lazy isn't a decent defense - they obviously didn't care to make the spots red. Don't try to test me on the limitations of the NES, I'm very aware of them and this is a non-issue.
Specifically, sprite data on the NES is broken into fragments to save ROM space, since there was very little to work with. Those fragments are recompiled by the program. If the programmers had wanted to, they could have written the game to display the head using a separate palette from the 3 colors present. This could've easily been done by making use of the same palette available to the Shy Guys and similar enemies with no tradeoff in performance or available sprite palettes. One of the games pictured above, Bionic Commando, made use of that same technique the same year of release. Another one, Punch Out!, was released the year
before SMB2, by Nintendo themselves. The technique is not dependent on any manner of extra hardware or unusual programming logic, it simply takes advantage of the graphic information being fragmented in a logical way.