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Long time Vampire Rave member Punkie
passed away this past Saturday, May 22, 2010. She was a front seat passenger in an early morning automobile accident.
She was transported via helicopter to Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia where she later died from injuries
related to the crash.
You can find a news article about this tragedy here.
Click here to view a cached image of the story that ran on montgomerynews.com on March 24, 2010.
You can find her obituary here.
Click here to view a cached image of her obituary.
She was a positive influence on the Vampire Rave community. She will be greatly missed.
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Welcome to Vampire Rave!
Vampire Rave is the social networking website for vampires and goths. We are a home for real vampires across the globe.
Vampire Rave was designed as an online resource for the vampire community. Our goal is to catalog everything there is to be cataloged
about vampires. This is an immense task and we have a long way to go. With your help we will become the largest vampire database,
resource, and community on the Internet.
As a member you can add to our database and help us grow. Sign up today!
Vampire Rave is a participating member of The Dark Network.
If you're looking for the Vampire Rave Banner Exchange, it's here.
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If you enjoy the time you spend at Vampire Rave, Premium Membership is the best way to support the site. Your contributions help pay for the ever-increasing bandwidth costs. Premium Members are the sole recipients of future site enhancements. Whenever a new feature is added to VR, it is Premium Members who benefit.
Discover the benefits of Premium Membership here.
Order a Premium Membership here. Plans start at just $4.95.
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The Vampire in Literature
Numerous vampire stories were written prior to the popularization of the vampire myth in pop culture.
The Vampyre; a Tale by John Polidori (1819)
A short story that exploited the gothic horror predilections of the public of the period. It was originally mis-published
under the authorship of Lord Byron (Polidori was Lord Byron's personal physician). The tale accounts the exploits of Lord Ruthven,
a British nobleman and vampire. Lord Ruthven bore more than a passing resemblance to Lord Byron and became a highly influential
model for the Byronic vampires of literature.
Varney The Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer (1845-47)
A Victorian-era gothic horror story which first appeared in a series of pamphlets between 1845 and 1847. Inexpensive and
gruesome, the collective work was published in book form in 1847. The tale runs 868 pages and is divided into 220 chapters. The story
revolves around the persecution of the Bannerworth family by Sir Francis Varney, a vampire who in the early chapters enters
the bedroom of the daughter of the house (Flora) and sucks her blood.
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)
A compelling gothic novel of a lesbian vampire, set in darkest central Europe. It tells the story of a young woman's susceptibility
to the attentions of a female vampire named Carmilla. The story was to greatly influence Bram Stoker in the writing of Dracula.
It also served as the basis for several films, including Hammer's The Vampire Lovers (1970), Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses (1960),
and Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932).
Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
The most well known vampire story, the novel is mainly composed of journal entries, letters, and newspaper clippings. It has
been suggested that the story was based on Vlad Tepes, a medieval figure of extraordinary bloodthirst. History records that Vlad Tepes
impaled his enemies and cut off their heads. He ruled Walachia as Vlad III during the 15th century (modern day Romania) and signed
his letters as Vlad Dracula. Dracula translates into "son of the devil".
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Featured Game
Infamous: Festival of Blood
Festival of Blood begins with Cole's best friend Zeke sitting alone in a bar. When a busty woman sits down next to him, he attempts to impress her with a completely made-up story about how he and Cole vanquished vampires from New Marais. Zeke narrates the story as you play through as Cole, who finds himself bitten by a female vampire named Bloody Mary and turned into a vampire himself. Infamous' humorous slant has returned, and the tongue-in-cheek story is entertaining but poorly fleshed out. It admittedly comes off as rushed and half-baked.
Regardless of the subpar nature of the story being told, Infamous: Festival of Blood still plays extremely well. Cole's moveset is generally the same as you remember; he can shoot electrically-charged bolts, grenades and rockets. He can grind on rails or hover in the air. New moves have been added in, too, giving Cole something called Vampire Sense and allowing him to fly all around New Marais as a group of vampire bats, giving you mobility even a parkour-heavy series like Infamous has never provided before.
But as I played through the main story, I came to realize just how short the narrative is, and how Festival of Blood gives you no compelling reason to play it again. I beat the game, beginning to end, in 80 minutes. There are no side quests to distract from the main quest, and one of Infamous' great pillars -- choice -- is nowhere to be found in Festival of Blood. Cole automatically leans evil in the game because he's been turned into a vampire (which forces him to do things like drink the blood of New Marais' citizenry to stay alive), but what if I wanted to play as a different sort of Cole? Isn't that what Infamous has always been about?
If you want to play beyond the main story, you can. There are 100 Canopic Jars to find strewn around New Marais, and these will help raise Cole's blood meter, a new addition introduced in Festival of Blood that primarily governs his ability to use the aforementioned flying ability. Bloody Mary has also left some more cleverly-hidden rune-like collectibles around New Marais itself, but these items are easy to find due mostly to helpful in-game tools and the small nature of Festival of Blood's map. Don't expect to see the entire city. You won't be able to explore the northern island at all, which is essentially half of New Marais.
Festival of Blood reintroduces the notion of Infamous UGC -- or User-Generated Content -- that was first revealed in Infamous 2. You can again create your own missions, this time with some new tools that help you tell the story you're weaving just a little bit better. Playing other users' UGC will help prolong Festival of Blood a little bit more, but UGC wasn't really my thing in Infamous 2, and the same can be said here (mostly because the tools are too complicated for me to wrap my head around). But if you enjoyed it in Infamous 2, the toolset is more robust and you're likely to enjoy making missions even more.
Then again, if you focus on doing the main quest, finding all of the collectibles and grabbing all of the non UGC-related Trophies in lieu of building and playing missions, you should only expect to sink about three hours into Festival of Blood before you've seen and done just about everything.
Infamous: Festival of Blood is also PlayStation Move-enabled, and it works fairly well, but -- surprise, surprise -- you'll definitely want to stick with your DualShock controller. Infamous: Festival of Blood's gameplay-tight mechanics shouldn't be mucked up with motion controls. |
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