I'll Novotrade you, but not my Appaloosa.

Before I start writing anything, let me link you folks to Team-Europe's blog.
Today's a good day for me, because those USA Pico dumps came from Storyware carts I supplied to them. :D

... Now, speaking of USA dumps, I've actually been trying to look into the USA games in terms of proper developer credits. This is in part because in a few of the games you can actually find the credits somewhere in there. For example, "Huckle and Lowly's Busiest Day Ever" and "Tails and the Music Maker" have credits, hidden as easter eggs, as selectable objects right on the title screen listing the appropriate Novotrade developers.

Sometimes looking at prototypes can be helping in figuring out who developed what, too. For example, I examined the "Tails and the Music Maker" prototypes that Hidden-Palace.org released a long while back. And it turned out the "first" one wasn't actually "Tails and the Music Maker"... it was "Magic Crayons", but with header data blanked out. When you compared it with the next "Tails" prototype that actually had Tails data, you could tell that "Magic Crayons" code was used as the basis because there were a few holdover elements apparent, such as the preliminary "PICO" splash screen.

You can also note coding similarities between games. The made-for-US Pico games have a fairly different "flavor" from Japanese ones. Novotrade games in particular tend to have "minigames" that can go for a prolonged time compared to a Japanese game's short games, chiptune music that sounds "simpler" than Japanese games, and are more focused on directly giving lessons. Compare "Sonic the Hedgehog's Gameworld" to "Tails and the Music Maker" and you can see easily how two developers can approach the Pico radically differently, even with the same characters as a basis.

I have a good hunch that Novotrade actually developed a huge majority of the games made for the US Pico audience, but more research has to go into that to confirm it, especially since US Pico games rarely even had developer or publisher logos like Japanese Pico games do. Of course, finding Japanese Pico game credits proper is hard, too...

... Apologies if this one sounds a bit more complicated than my "I'm trying to write for beginners" articles from earlier.