Memory 8 of 10: Xbox 360 (7th Gen.)

My family and I spent New Year's Eve 2009 in São Paulo at my brother's house. In early 2010, I took the opportunity to buy the Xbox 360 in São Paulo, because it was much cheaper than in my city.

I bought the game Gears of War 2, from Epic Games, together with the Xbox 360:

My first experience with Xbox 360 and Gears of War 2 was unforgettable for several reasons:

• I played with my brother on his 42" Full HD TV. Before that I had only played on a small PC monitor and on a notebook.

• Gears of War 2 was developed with Unreal Engine 3 and has an impressive graphic quality.

• Gears of War 2 campaign and gameplay are interesting and designed for co-op.

• It reminded me of the good times I had with my brother when we played "Contra III" on the Super Nintendo in 1992 before he moved to another city to study.

The next game I bought for my Xbox 360 was Mass Effect 2, which is an Action/RPG game by Bioware. This has become my favorite game of all time. 

I really liked the dialogue scenes that have cinematic quality with meaningful choices. The characters that are part of our team are interesting and have engaging personal quests.  

Mass Effect trilogy was developed with Unreal Engine 3. In 2011, I bought the PC version of Mass Effect 1 to play on my notebook. In 2012, I bought Mass Effect 3 for the Xbox 360 to complete the trilogy:

 

The Xbox 360 became my family's video game. I have two kids. My son is five years older than my daughter. I bought two more controllers and looked for games with 4 player local multiplayer.

These game sessions with everyone gathered in the living room were a lot of fun, especially when we had guests at home. My favorite game with 4 player support is the racing game Blur: 

Blur is a racing and combat game with amazing visual effects. There are eight types of powerups available on the tracks to be collected and activated by racers.

The Xbox 360 game most played by my kids over the years was without a doubt Minecraft:

My son loved creating all kinds of sculptures with Minecraft blocks. When he grew up he started playing Call of Duty and my daughter took his place in Minecraft. 

Xbox 360 Minecraft supports 4 player split screen. When my daughter's friends were at my house, they played Minecraft and my daughter would created houses for each of her friends. I was impressed with my daughter's speed to make these constructions in Minecraft.

In 2010, I started studying the UDK (Unreal Development Kit), which is a version of Unreal Engine 3 that Epic Games released to the community. The UDK/UE3 uses a scripting language called UnrealScript.

When I was learning the UDK I realized that there were few materials teaching programming in UnrealScript. Epic Games had a reference documentation but to see UnrealScript in practice it was necessary to study the source code of the example that came with the UDK.

In 2011, I decided to create the Romero UnrealScript blog in English to teach game programming in the UDK with UnrealScript. To my surprise, I received excellent feedback on the UDK forum regarding my tutorials.

I got excited and wrote dozens of UnrealScript articles making my blog one of the main UnrealScript references on the internet.

Due to the success of the Romero UnrealScript blog, in June 2013, Epic Games invited me to be part of the closed beta of Unreal Engine 4.

In August 2020, Epic Games invited me to a Livestream about my Blueprints work. Tom Shannon who was participating in the Livestream is the author of this book: 

I presented my history on Livestream and when I showed the Romero UnrealScript blog, Tom Shannon said that he spent a lot of time on my blog learning UnrealScript. This occurs at 18 minutes of the Livestream that can be accessed at this link:

Teaching & Learning Blueprints with Marcos Romero

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