Last year Team Meerkat raised a total of $577 for the fight against children’s cancer, this year we want to do better. We’ll again be opening our doors to whoever would like to join the team for the 24 hour effort, the more the merrier. Each member will get access to our voice server where you can co-op, chat or be coached through that sleepy patch. You’ll also get listed on the new website’s member list which links right to your sponsor page, you’ll also have the ability to post to the site in a number of ways either during the event or in the build up. You should get to see that new site in a few weeks, we’ll be posting full joining instructions at that time. But if you’d like to join right away: go here. Once you’ve signed up, search for ‘Team Meerkat’ then click the join button.

New for Extra Life 2010 is location based donations. Donations now not only go to the Texas Children’s Hospital, but  also can be sent to whichever participating hospital you choose. Check the Sarcastic Gamer post for further details.
Also new for 2010 is Extra Life’s partnership with the Children’s Miracle Network to bring you all these new donation locations. Hopefully some of the barriers to donations we saw last year will now be removed thanks to the move locally.

I should get going to work on that new site.

- Rei

The teams total amount raised is: $577!

Congratulations to the whole team for getting the donations in and for staying the 24 hour course.  Here’s looking forward to next year, an even bigger team and even more money raised for the battle against child cancer!

- Rei

Team Meerkat starts the Extra Life event at 8am PST (that’s 4pm GMT in the afternoon for you euros) on Saturday, and will continue to play games online for a full 24 hours until 8am (4pm GMT) on Sunday.

There are a few ways you can keep in touch with what we are doing and make sure we’re actually playing games, not goofing off;

Firstly, we will be streaming as much of the gameplay from the event as possible via two streams. We’ll also record the start, finish and any ’special’ moments for your repeat viewing pleasure.  While we will strive to steam the whole event some games may cause live feed interruption, FPS’s have been playing up.

You can view the live steam, as well as any recordings, from Reishi’s computer here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/team-meerkat-live-reishi

You can view the live stream, as well as any recordings, from Akiliyan’s computer here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/team-meerkat-extra-life-event

We will also be making an appearance on MAD-Radio, a gaming related online radio station, twice. Our first show appearance will be at the start of the 24 hours to get things underway. The second appearance will be on Sunday, so you can hear how much we are hurting with only a few hours to go. Actual times posted Friday.

You can listen to the shows live at;
iTunes/VLC/Winamp – http://mad-radio.sytes.net:88/listen.pls
Windows Media Player – http://mad-radio.sytes.net:88

We’d like to thank all our sponsors so far for helping us reach our individual goals.  Our team member Reishi has reached his goal of $300 in donations, yay, so if you’d still like to donate please consider our other members. http://www.teammeerkat.com/sponsor-team-meerkat/

You can also follow our progress on twitter @teammeerkat

The icons themselves come in three sizes which you can download right of the page, or if you’d like the whole set you can download the zip provided below. If anyone asks where you got the icons we’d love it if you could point them our way, we need as many individual or team sponsorships as we can get, Extra Life 09 is getting closer!

Download all the icons here!

- Rei

Please give a warm welcome to Lugana Selacious.  Lug is a fellow EvE and Battlefield player who we’ve know for a few years and we’re all delighted he’s decided to join and help the team reach our goal.  The team has Aki’s sterling effort on MAD radio to thank for our first new team member, you can read all about Lugana on the team page.

-Rei

Today I was launched into the world of internet broadcasting as I got invited to join Ooyama on MAD-radio. I was nervous as I could possibly be when doing this, going out live in front of people can’t say I’ve ever been accustomed to the idea.  Yama, however, made me feel welcome and kept me from making a complete ass of myself. It was an intriguing way to tell people of the event and after only minutes of doing the interview I had two people approach me interested in actually doing the event. To all those who missed this, not to worry as we will be doing more and more events to help raise awareness of this campaign.

It is also in a side note that I would like to thank everyone who did listen, for at least taking the time and listening to what I had to say and for being so friendly and welcoming of me onto the show. I had a great time and want to thank Yama for making it all possible. The more people are aware the more we can raise, and the more people will do the event or sponsor us.

Akiliyan

P.S. MAD-radio can be found at http://mad-radio.sytes.net:88/

This poster takes elements from our site design we know you’ll love and throws them on a poster you can print out at work or at home, for fun or to help us get more sponsors!

Without further ado you can download and preview the poster below;

Download the Team Meerkat Extra Life 09 poster now!

We’ve all been beavering away and all the work is done on the most important pages. Over the next few days we’ll be pushing out some new blog posts on our personal preparations for the Extra Life event and over the coming months you’ll get to hear all the goings on with organization and our live coverage tests.

This new site is also the place where you’ll be able to setup gaming with us across the event and help us complete our 24 hour stint. The 24 hours will be long, there will be lows, highs and many many cups of coffee.

We’d also like to extend our thanks to family and better halves who’ll be putting up with our shenanigans across the event, we apologize in advance for waking you up with our giggles.

We also hope you’ll enjoy the gaming content we post, both Extra Life related and not, and enjoy using the site.

- Rei