Since when did ms aquire Battle toads? Are t hey not owned by trade west
Even setting aside that the IP was apparently owned by Rare in full (and thus would have transferred to MS upon their acquisition of Rare), Tradewest folded many, many years ago and even Midway went bankrupt in 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradewest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Games
So even if some rights remained with Tradewest/Midway, it's very likely MS could've quietly snatched up those rights during Midway's collapse five years ago.
TLDR, I would not be surprised at all to hear that MS now owns the Toads lock, stock and barrel. Even outside of Rare's rights, I doubt any remaining residual rights were worth that much.
As for the game itself, or at least the NES one: it was always obvious that the main problem it suffered from was a lack of QA time, both for balance and for bug-sweeping. The Japanese release, which got that extra QA time, was a hell of a lot more fun to play and made the game's strengths (such as the insane things it did with the NES hardware) shine.
Who knows what form a revival might take, though. It would depend enormously on the developer.
