Bon Annee 2010!

We honestly don't remember how last New Year's Day was spent riffled through our photo folders and found out that New Year's Day last year saw us having lunch with the guys at Tony Romas at Cineleisure, and that the BFF celebrated the countdown to 2009 at Bunny's. Sometime after Christmas we were planning to do a New Year's lunch and movie with the guys, with Avatar (in 3D) in mind for the movie. As for the lunch venue, we weren't sure but thought that there were some places on the first floor in 1 Utama's old wing that we could try.

The Chief then commented on a radio ad about a restaurant in 1U where each patron had his own steamboat to eat from, and the others thought that the ad must be for Plus 1 Shabu Shabu.

Turns out that they were correct about the place and so we were soon led to a round table for six. Round tables really make for great conversing among the whole group, especially when waiting for our food to cook!

We decided to go for the chicken set while the Chief opted for the pork set, and our food was served in a jiffy. The Chief had the Chinese herbal broth and we risked the tomyam soup. The tomyam soup turned out to be not spicy and rather delish that we ended up not dipping our food in any sauce at all!

The meal was ok, but we suppose what makes the dishes taste better would be their selection of sauces available. We tried the fish sauce but that turned out to be too strong, and we ended up just drinking our tomyam soup.

Also the meal portion wasn't so filling that as soon as we were done eating we were all considering dessert elsewhere. After a toss-up between desserts or ta kei, the arcades won out and we all decided to buy popcorn instead when in the cinema.

The arcades in 1U still had a variety of games other than the fighting and racing games! There's the whatchamacallit claw game to try and snag a doll, penny drops, even a Guitar Hero-like game, air hockey (where Lemon and 'Vin battled it out so fiercely that the puck kept flying out from the table!) and...

The boxing game. Sans boxing glove now. That game has been there ever since the arcade opened for business and well, we were rather curious as how the game works as we never stopped to watch people play it before!

Lemon, 'Vin, Chief and us took turns playing. 'Vin was up first and started the basic game on Easiest mode, where the screen showed a cartoon ahlong trying to get money from him and 'Vin was suppose to knock him out.

First punch! And he scored some 70-something Mtrs (Metres, as in how far the victim flew? We don't know). We them find out that you have three punches total in order to score some 250-260 Mtrs in order to proceed. With an average of 70-something Mtrs per punch, 'Vin soon lost.

We were next up when we accidentally chose the camera function mode: instead of a cartoon ahlong, the game took a picture of our face and superimposed it on said ahlong's cartoon body. Seeing this the Chief perked up and volunteered to take over from us...However the Chief is gentle and thus scored an average of 60-something Mtrs.

Lemon decided to try the Medium difficulty instead! He managed to sock a 80 Mtr hit but with a required total of 290 Mtr to win he too was out. Turns out he wasn't trying for a higher difficulty but thought that it was just to change the victims.

Us, we scored the same as 'Vin, with 70-something punches. Discussing about the game we figure the punching glove would have made it much easier to score. Still, all in good fun!

And yes, Avatar 3D!

Interestingly, everyone except the Chief and us had already watched Avatar, in fact, 'Vin watched it in 3D too! This made it his second viewing in 3D!

Our take on the show? Excellent. Show's pacing did not seem sluggish nor rushed, the story helped immerse us even better into the Pandora and the Na'vi culture. Oh and after a while we forgot all about 3D, heh. Definitely a great watch.

Next up will be, as the Chief put it, Gong Zhu Jing Wah, and we've yet to catch Sherlock!

And movies we're looking forward to this year: Prince Of Persia (please be a decent game-based movie please), Clash Of The Titans (stunning effects, does anyone have a minus one of the song "The Bird And The Worm" that was used in the trailer?), Iron Man 2, Shrek Ever After (Puss now makes us think of Garfield!!!) and should we be expecting the first part of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows?