This is an interesting topic, because I've never had this problem before. This past Sunday, I participated in a video game tournament at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. The tournament was sponsored by Mazda, and was for the game Need For Speed Carbon, which, as we all know, is still not currently out yet to the public. As you can obviously tell, I did not win in this tournament, but it brought up a very interesting debate. Of the sixteen people that participated, the top four times were able to go on to the next round. But all four of the people that did had an advantage. For those of you that have an Xbox 360, you know that they released a demo for Need For Speed Carbon. To no suprise, they used the Xbox 360 version of the game at the tournament, but the dispute was, they used the same track that was in the demo version. Now, for me personally, I do not own a 360, and so I have not yet played the game at all. I, as well as the other people who had not played it at all yet, agreed that we felt this was slightly unfair. They also had set up a booth at the Mall of America ahead of time, for people to play the demo just for fun, and they played using the same car and track that we used for the tournament. The person who won the tournament had come and used the demo every day for the week before. I feel that this is totally unfair. The prize for winning the national version of this tournament is a new car, Mazda, of course. The playing field should have been level for us all. This game has not even come out yet, so we should have all had the same amount of knowledge and experience playing this game as everyone else had. This, obviously, was not the case. I must admit, I am quite unhappy with the way the tournament was held, due to the fact that there was already a demo out, not only at the location that the tournament was held, but also on the Xbox 360 for anyone to play already. Do I also not agree with putting out demos of games onto Xbox Live? Not necessarily, but I feel that if they are going to have a tournament using a game that is not out yet, that they should take into consideration that there is a demo out that could possibly give an unfair advantage to a certain group of people. It is an interesting topic that I truly never considered before, but brings up a very interesting point. Are video game tournaments unfair? Or should we not complain, and be able to adapt no matter how much experience that ourselves or our opponents may have?