We don’t play to make friends - we bring our own!

Xbox Live Arcade Uno Charity Tournament - Starts 9/15!

August 20th, 2008 UncleGramps

8-Bit Brigade is proud to present our first ever Uno Tournament for Charity! We hope that this event will be successful enough for us to run similar tournaments once or twice each year. For this inaugural event, our chosen charity is Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation. Their website can be found at http://www.starlight.org. Here’s a brief description of what they do, taken from their site:

“Starlight Starbright brings together experts from pediatric health care, technology, and entertainment to create programs that educate, entertain and inspire seriously ill children.”

Among other things, the organization provides mobile Fun Centers (which include a TV, Nintendo Wii console, and DVD player) to children in hospitals across the country. We feel that this charity is worthy of our support, and we hope you agree!

This tournament will take place using Uno over Xbox Live, so you must have the Uno Xbox Live Arcade game if you want to participate. Teams of two will play against each other in a single-elimination tournament. The brackets will be randomly generated using tournament bracket software, and depending on the number of teams who enter, some teams may get a bye. Each match will be a “best of three” series, and the winning team will receive two 1600 Microsoft Point cards (one for each player on the team). If additional prizes are donated, the 2nd place team (and maybe even 3rd and 4th place teams) will receive prizes as well.  (If you want to contribute a prize, please send a message to 8bitbrigade.charity.fund@gmail.com.)

If you want to participate, the entry fee is $5 per person (i.e., $10 per team), and all of your donated money goes directly to Starlight Starbright. To sign up, send your donation via Paypal to 8bitbrigade.charity.fund@gmail.com (a donation link is posted below), and be sure to include your gamertag and the gamertag of the person you’d like to have as your teammate. To keep things organized, please make sure you have a teammate selected before you donate and sign up.

[donate]

A dedicated thread for the tournament has been posted in the 8-Bit Brigade forums. Within this thread, the tournament bracket will be posted, and participants will be able to talk to each other to schedule their matches. The first round is scheduled to start on Monday, September 15th. Each round will last up to 7 days, and opponents are responsible for scheduling their own matches within those 7 days. Three games of Uno can be completed fairly quickly, and 7 days should be adequate time to coordinate your matches. However, we are aware that unexpected events may happen, and the end date for a round can be pushed back in special cases. If such an adjustment is needed, please post in the tournament thread to let the organizers know. If all participants in a round finish their matches prior to the scheduled end of the round, the start date for the following round will be moved up accordingly, and the new start date will be posted in the tournament thread. When each match is completed, any of the participants can post the results in the tournament thread or email the results to 8bitbrigade.charity.fund@gmail.com. This is a charity event, and as such, we expect that everyone will report the results of their games truthfully. In the unlikely event of disputed results, the organizers of the tournament will contact the parties involved and make a decision about what actions will be taken. Remember to have fun and play fair!

Here are game rules and settings to be used within Uno:

From the main menu:

Choose:
Multiplayer game
Player Match
House Rules Uno
Standard Deck

In the House Rules screen, choose
Game Mode: Partner Uno
Theme Deck: Standard Deck
Scoring Type: Traditional
Game Score: 250
Penalties: Progressive
Draw Type: Draw One and Play
Forced Play: Off
Bluffing: On
Call Uno: On

To keep things fair, we’re asking that all players refrain from tabletalk (eg. saying “I need green” to your partner in open chat). While some players find this to be an acceptable practice, others don’t, and we’re erring on the side of caution in terms of what constitutes cheating.

That’s it! If you have any questions, please post in the tournament thread, send a private message to UncleGramps through the 8-Bit Brigade forums, or send email to 8bitbrigade.charity.fund@gmail.com. As always, your support of our charity efforts is greatly appreciated!

Posted in Charity Events | 16 views

Mya McIntosh Benefit COD4 Tournament

July 2nd, 2008 admin

8-Bit Brigade and Gaming4Others are pleased to invite you to play in the

MYA MCINTOSH BENEFIT COD4 Tournament.

Mya is 5 1/2 year old living with cerebral palsy. She is in need of surgery that will enable her to walk. She is anxious to start Kindergarten cast free! There are only 5 doctors qualified to do her surgery and with the sudden lay-off of Mya’s dad, she needs help to get it done.

Please join us July 22-24 to play COD4 and get Mya the surgery she needs!
For more information visit:
http://myaq.chipin.com/myas-cp-surgery-trip

Registration Fee is $10 per person ($60 per team)
COD4 6×6 best of 3
Prizes will be awarded!

Sign-up at G4O under the EVENTS tab

See Tournament forum for more game info and Rules

Posted in Charity Events | 60 views

Please Help MacNTosh

June 26th, 2008 Duster72

For those of you who are not familiar with our clanmate MacNTosh, he has two children with special needs and lost his job last week. Rather than attempt to do justice to him with a recap, I am just going to cut and paste a couple of his posts here. Please chip in some money for him.

Hey guy’s most of y’all know I recently lost my job. On top of this wonderful news I have my two children each with special needs of their own. Well my daughter has an opportunity to have a procedure done that will allow her to walk like most “normal” childrens patterns for about five year. This procedure is only done by five doctors in the world and one of them is about 300 miles away. We have it scheduled for late July, but in all honesty we are going to need some help with lodging, gas and food.

This being said, I have created a ChipIn page to help us with these costs if you are interested then please click the following link: ChipIn

Just to share a little back story on Medicaid, Social Security and WIC (The Food Stamp People)

When we found out Aidan was going to have multiple issues and need nursing on his release we were put in touch to start working on getting him Medicaid through Social Security. When I applied I also spoke with them about my daughter as CP is suppose to be an automatic approval. Not so if you are the working class poor in America.

Over the last year I have made about 40K in base salary with commission. This is too much to get benifits for Mya even though I pay 400-600 a month in therapy and such, cover her under our family insurance at $1200 a month and lose many pennies to deductables and our tax system. I was lucky with Aidan however. Since he was living at the hospital, my salary, retirement and cars where not taken into consideration. He was granted SSI benifits, $30 per month and Medicaid, which if we did not have could not afford to take care of him. He has 6-8 different therapy sessions per week, left the Hospital with a 1.8 million dollar bill and we still have some creditors calling for deductables and such that medicaid didn’t cover because we found out to late to apply in order to cover his first couple of months.

So medicaid is still based on salary, but we are willing to give it away to many people that don’t even pay taxes, as I see it every time I have to visit SSA. I do lose his benefits however in months that have three paychecks, as those months I make too much money. That is two months this year.

On top of this is WIC which provides his formula. When you only have 25% of your small intestine you don’t eat like other kids. His formula costs 8.50 per can and he uses four a day. We are lucky enough that we get to drive to the “nice” part of town, sign our vouchers, sit in a room where no one speaks english, and are the one’s stared at. Heck last time they called numbers and such in Spanish first and when no one stood up, that’s when they looked and saw the white girl in the corner and announced it in english.

All this being said, our medical system is really screwed up. SSA told me the best way to insure my daughter would be for me to give custody to my wife and divorce her. This way they could be covered since she is a stay at home mom, who works harder then most with all of their therapys.

I know their is lots of spelling errors and such, and quite a bit of rambling, but hopefully I have shed a little light on my situation.

If you have quesitons, feel free to ask. I’m willing to answer it all from the inside as the “working” poor in America.

Posted in Charity Events | 27 views