Team Meerkat starts the Extra Life event at 7am PST (that’s 3pm GMT in the afternoon for you euros) on Saturday, and will continue to play games online for a full 24 hours until 7am (3pm GMT) on Sunday.

This year we’ll again have a few different ways to keep up to date and in touch with the team. You can head over to the twitter feed at twitter.com/teammeerkat or follow us live on Ustream using one of the links below;

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

Our site has had a small overhaul for 2010, we’ve got a new design and slightly changed layout. This years major addition is a forum for our members. Don’t worry though guests will be able to post too!

New freebies

We’ve stayed with the same format as last year to bring you some new freebies, both Avatars and Poster are out already, with more planned for closer to October 16th. All of our freebies are still available for download from last year too.

We’ve continued the theme from last year: elements of the site design laid out with Extra Life information and ways for the reader to sponsor us or participate in the event.

Whatever you download the poster for, we hope you enjoy it!

Download the Team Meerkat 2010 Extra Life poster

The avatar icons themselves come in three sizes, 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 2010 is getting closer!

Download all the icons here!

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