TV was published by 3D Realms but its two sequels were published by Microsoft. Does anyone know if they still hold the rights to those games?

Also, I played Fury3 and Hellbender but never got to play Terminal Velocity? Is it at least as good as Fury3?

It goes like this:

Terminal Velocity when released was significant for it's technical achievements. MS where just started to push DirectX, so they used their HugePilesOfCash to get Terminal Velocity remade using DirectX. The result was Fury3 which:
- Did not support as high resulution
- Only ran in Windows 95 (at the time everyone would exit Windows to run games)
- Did not support multiplayer

The game play is exactly the same, you could consider Fury3 a Terminal Velocity expansion which dropped engine features.

Hellbender, while a sequel to Fury3, played completely differently and ruined the point of the game, in my opinion.

the people who made TV were former microsoft programmers from the flight sim team ms hired them to build a filght sim to show off the new activex. the other was DOOM 95 witch ms did internal to move sales of windows 95 as an gamer platform and end MS-DOS game development.

But TV doesn't have the exact same levels or anything like that does it?

I think Microsoft have the rights for Fury3 and Hellbender, yes, but I'm not entirely sure.

Found it kinda funny that the top rated review right now calls Fury3 a blatant ripoff when it is in fact made by the same people, and is nearly the same game.

Fury3 is pretty much Terminal Velocity with a different coat of paint and was made to run on Win95. They play exactly the same.

They would have to sign up Microsoft first.

No. Fury³ has a completely different storyline, and completely different planets.

Fury³ levels:

Terran (Earth)
L24D (basically Venus, made of explodey material)
Ares (Mars, but even redder)
New Kroy (city planet like Coruscant in Star Wars)
Sebek (Ancient Egypt planet)
Vestra (asteroid)
Tiamat (ocean planet, underwater)
Fury (artificial planet like the Death Star in SW)

Some of the planets are very similar in appearance. Sebek and Tei Tenga look almost identical.

Both TV and F3 have start and ending cutscenes depicting the launch and landing of the player's fighter from a mothership.

The compass looks identical. The HUD is very much the same style, although slightly different.

One major difference I noticed is that when you hit tab in TV, instead of bringing up the map, it displays all the targets around you on the HUD, which to be honest I like better, as it gives a wider show of targets in real time.

I like to headcanon TV as taking place in the same storyline as F3 and HB. With the Bion army created to make sure nothing like the Xenocidic Initiative ever happens again.