I've always heard the various characters in MB referred to as 'modes', the same as the 'missions' you say you don't like. What do you find different about MB from those?

As goatdan says, MB plays very different from IM. Although I suppose you could set it up really hard, there's no magnets or kickers that fire back at you, the outlanes are designed in a really friendly way, and besides from losing any modes you've got going when a ball drains, progress carries over ball to ball. Although getting all the modes going at once and then bringing in Frank can be a tough, 'one chance' type of thing, in general the mini-wizard mode is probably one of the easiest to achieve of any machine. MB and The Getaway are the only machines I know of where my tournament strategy is 'go for wizard mode'.