Bublehead says, keep calm, relax, take a breath, inhale- exhale- inhale- exhale- grab a gun- inhale- grab some bullets- exhale- load the gun- inhale- place it on your right temple- exhale- decide life is worth living- inhale- sneeze and accidently blow your brains out- exhale-

Seriously, the wait was torture and I lost a lot of weight just due to all the nervous axious waiting while I weighed my options on cancelling or if the weight of guilt I would feel would be unbearable if I cancelled and found out someone who had not waited had weighed in with my distributor and bypassed waiting and right now the freight guy was weighing the pallet and creating a waybill before sending it on its way to the customer who had not waited at all.

But I feel the pain since I was living the nightmare just a short time ago. I am so happy now with my MBrLE, that it got here in one piece, looks amazing, plays great, and PISSES ME OFF!!! on a regular basis. Do not be surprised you find yourself tightening up the outlanes, turning on an 8 second ball saver and jacking it up beyond 6.5 degrees of slope just to mitigate the outlanes from super sucking balls worse than Kevin Spacey.

My advice to waitees is call your distributors and Ryan at CGC and put them on speed dial... it didnt speed up delivery of my machine but at least I got more info out of them for me and others that way...

Good luck to everyone still waiting.

I would say there is a little bit of “if you build it, they will come” arrogance to CGC’s cavalier attitude towards customers and delays. Like Monster Bash is their gift/offering/sacrafice to the pinball gods and if you want a piece of the sacred relic, you will wait until THEY want you to have it, and not a moment sooner.

On CGC’s delivery mechanism to it’s distributors, this is the way it was explained to me... as was said earlier, distributors got machines based on total order percentage out of 1250. My distributor had 55 LE slots in his allotment. So he got a 55 out of 1250 percent take of all games as they come down the line. They build 30 machines this week, my distributor got 55/1250th of that shipment, and PPS got the biggest cut every batch because, well, they own the license and got the lionshare of the order. This would have worked if the number of machines was more than a trickle each week. This meant more machines went to the top distributors because the batch size was so small, this left no machines out of the batch for smaller distributors, which means customers with PPS have WAY more machines delivered to them because there is no fractionional division lower than 1 machine..

Lets take a hypothetical look at this delivery model... using 1000 limited edition machines to be produced

We are going to use some hypothetical numbers for clarity, first lets say we have 10 distributors A through J and within this distribution of allotments A has 50%, B has 15%, C has 10%, D has 5%, E through J have 3.33% share of the allotments. When part of an alotment is less than 1 machine we round up for .51 to 1 and .49 down to 0.

First scenario, 60 machines a week production rate... so batch size is 60 machines a week, so first week a distribution of:

A = 30
B = 9
C = 6
D = 3
E-J = 2 each

Every distributor is getting at least 2 machines a week.

Second scenario, 16 machines a week production rate...

A = 8
B = 2.4 = 2
C = 1.6 = 2
D = 0.8 = 1
E-J = 0.53 = 1

So 16-8-2-2-1 = 3 and this leaves us with only 3 machines to divy up between E - J leaving 3 distributors out in the cold getting no machines at all... and the next week, the same thing happens, top distributors get the machines, bottom feeders get nothing, and this continues and continues until A has all of their machines, B has all of theirs, C gets a trickle, D sees one a week if he’s lucky, and E through J sit in the trenches getting nothing but a bone once in a while.

Sound familiar? Sound fair? As long as production is up, not bad, but when production rates fall to a trickle, this system implodes.

I am going to buy CGC #4 on the customer appreciation and number matching program and use PPS as my distributor to buy the next remake. Screw the six month wait and lets hope to God its not Cactus Canyon, because you can’t polish that turd long enough to make me want to buy it, yet it sits between me and the next great remake of BBB, TOM, TOTAN, TAF

OK but here’s something that is, I was told by a CGC rep to my face what the expected production rate of games were going to be and on the outside worst case scenario how late the game would get to me and they went on beyond zebra on that one so anybody who is in that same position as I was I sympathize with. I know what I am in for on the next go round, but if they keep the number matching program, although I didn't agree with it, I will definitely use it to go to the front of the line next time.

I physically tracked him down at TPF and he still ignored me... but to be fair, he turned around but didn’t look up and didn’t respond much more than that to my tap on his shoulder as he walked by so I just let it go... it wasn’t as if me towering over him was going to make him shit a MBrLE on the spot, but he looked like he had been run pretty ragged and me pissing in his Weaties was not going to do more than make me feel a little better. But mostly Ryan’s cred to me is pretty shot. You can’t just keep alluding to a future delivery date, (notice I didnt use the word “promise”), miss it, and keep claiming “silk screening playfields is hard” so just keep waiting guys.

Now on the actual machine I got? First rate. Love it. Top notch quality... perfect in almost every way. Worth the wait? Yeah, 20 years and 6 months but I finally got my MB.

This title was absolutely amazing for 1998, right on the heals of AFM, MM, when we were all playing mode based and trying to get to the “end” instead of trying to stack thirty seven features and 4 multipliers to get the high score. We were way less focused on score back then and were more fixated on getting to the wizard modes because that would almost always push you past free game territory. The main goal was beat the machine, get a free game, and if you kicked you friends ass while doing it, so much better the taste of victory. We cheered each other on to get that free game, even if it meant they would beat your score. All of us looked at the machine as the enemy, and our friends were always the collateral damage as you climbed the ladder to the top of the rule set, going for MOR, or Bash, taking as many monster modes into it as possible, or if nothing else was working, stack some monsters and start Frank multiball... fun fun fun and lots of frustration.

Do not try and compare it to any current deep rule title, you will be disappinted, but if you like AFM, MM, CC, or any of the B/W 90’s titles, then this is an awesome recreation of that magic, and the LE and the SE bring so much more than the OG MB had to offer. In the display and the new dots, and the topper on the LE is fantastic in it’s light show. I and the wife are enjoying the hell out of ours.

I am happy for those getting their games now but who had to wait even longer than me, because at this point, as a day 1 ordered, non # matched LE waitee and it is half way through May would put it at over half a year wait. After getting it, and playing it, I think I could have waited till Christmas 2019, having enjoyed it now for over 500 plays... between 2 people. I think all of 5 games have NOT been played by the wife and I, but thinking about it just now, its only had 2 other people play it for all of 3 games total. Knock the new off? Hells to the yeah, but just me and the wife for now

Really? You have actually seen video of MBr on Stern’s factory line? That would be truly amazing if it was true (at all?) Stern built the first MMr for CGC, but now CGC builds their own machines. Stern used to buy their cabinets from Churchill Cabinet which is what CGC is a subsidy of, but they had a falling out over MM production troubles, and so Stern told them suck wind, and started building their own cabinets. Last I heard, CGC MBr’s rolled off CGC’s line, not Stern’s, unless CGC paid Stern recently to help them out of their production delay.

I think he said why not get a BOP 2.0 instead, he helped test it and he loves that one. But then my French fails me after that.

See, my French failed me even before I started...

If it is BBBr, then I am in for the NIB BBBrLE experience, because other than the wait, my MBrLE is awesome, no complaints. It dimples a bit, but I have been playing it a f-ton... RTU is a harder accomplishment than MOR, and AFM will always be one of my favorite 90’s machines, but MB holds a special place in my nostalgia too. In my mind, you can’t go wrong with any CGC made machine, and if they do BBBrLE for $8300 delivered, just take my money now.

As titles go, BBB is a campy sci-fi send-up of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s “Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, set in a cosmic bar, complete with nude tube dancer, ball sucking alien locks, decent flow, great DMD animations, and the campy callouts... if Capcom only knew this title had the possibility to compete on the B/W scale and could possibly have set them up to take over pinball instead of Stern, they might have actually built it. As it was, a lot of people liked Capcom games, and Pinball Magic comes to mind. I love playing BBB, it is campy fun. Don’t know about longevity in a collection, other than usually, once someone is able to get one, they tend to not let them go.