Towards more accurate open source kart race balancing

The open source community has created many games that are based off of commercially available titles. Some games may have a more complete or accurate representation of their commercial counterpart while others strive to set themselves apart from being simply clones of a commercial game. This paper compares the open source kart racing game Super Tux Kart with its commercial peer Super Mario Kart. Obtaining items to be used against opponents is a feature common to both games that balance the abilities of the players, however the rates at which different items are handed to the player appear to be different. This paper presents a study which efficiently captures data from the commercial game, compares that data with the source code covering item selection in the open source game, and makes a suggestion in order to more accurately represent the item collection game balancing mechanism in the open source game.