oh, excellent, GTA5 has a hospital mission. time for X-RAY REVIEW

ok, so, this is closest to a posteroanterior skull view, but not a great one? The head is tilted too far back. That horizontal ridge below the orbital cavities should actually be behind the lower third of the orbits.

You do actually tilt the head back like that for the "OM" (occipito-mental) view, which opens up the orbits for better viewing of the contents and fractures of the margins - but if that's what they're going for, the head isn't far back enough. The ridge obscures the lower margin.

It's ok, still diagnostic, but the biggest problem with this x-ray is that there's no visible marker on it. Nothing to show which is the left or right side. The skull is symmetrical and films like this can be viewed from either side. It's really vital to know which side is which.

speaking of which, let's take a look at this chest x-ray.

It's been hung up backwards. The heart is on the wrong side, but since there is again no marker, it could be the case that the patient has dextrocardia. You can't know for sure. Put your fucking marker on.

In this case, it's reasonable to conclude that it's just up the wrong way - the diaphraghm on the right-hand side of the image is slightly raised, suggesting there's a liver underneath it. But that's not a super specific sign, lots of other things can cause that.

Otherwise it's OK! The patient's in a good position - check out the shoulderblades, the Y-shaped structures either side. Normally they sit right over the lung fields. You get patients to push their elbows out and forward to rotate them out of the way, but it doesn't always work.

It's centred a little too low as well, lot of abdomen on there. Abdomens absorb a lot of x-rays, and especially in wombéd patients you wanna avoid that area so you don't damage the ovaries or a potential developing foetus.

The white dots you see in each lung field look a bit like shotgun pellets, but it's not conclusive. They could just be weird calcifications, or air vessels seen end-on, although they're a little bright for that. Really there should also be a side-on film to localise them further.

I suspect they might actually just be photoshopped on to signify bullets - they look a bit odd, but it might just be compression artefacts in the game texture.

speaking of photoshop, let's have a look at the arm here. something screwy about this.

but before we get to that, where's the fucking marker? which arm is this? These are apparently two views of the same arm, why's it been flipped over between shots?

So in the left image, the hand is rotated towards the little finger - this is a technique we use to better display the scaphoid bone in the hand, which is a common fracture site. You probably wouldn't need to do this on a patient with pain so far up the radius, though.

But either way, this definitely looks fake. I've never seen a fracture like that - two straight, clean breaks cutting a wedge of bone out in a place where I wouldn't expect the radius to break without significant force. The fracture also changes position between images.

I'm not saying a break like that couldn't happen - there are things that could cause weird-shaped fractures like that. For example, the patient might have had screws and a plate in there previously, and an impact could cause breaks along the fault lines, but it's pretty unlikely.

on to the final x-ray, which is a dorso-palmar view of the hand. Don't know which hand, there's no fucking marker again. Anyway this one is generally fine apart from it being somewhat unorthodox to display x-rays by framing them and hanging them on the wall in the corridor

honestly this game does reasonably well with x-rays compared to most games? They're inaccurate but they're not conspicuously bad. The primary inaccuracy is that they're physical films developed in a darkroom and stuck up on a lightbox. We moved to computers quite a long time ago

thanks for reading. if you would like to hire me to consult on x-ray positioning for the hospital level in *your* videogame, my DMs are open (I think).