I was trying to remember how to set up the target meetings in Mumbai to get certain challenges done, and it helpfully inserted this absolute nonsense that is wrong about every single point: there is a meeting on a bridge, but it's between Shah and the manager of the laundry; the Maelstrom is a person, not a group; the Kashmirian is an independent assassin who never meets with anyone; Vanya Shah is a mob boss, not a businesswoman; and none of the meetings are important to the mission at all, they're just things you can make happen.
Naturally I told google this was, in fact, helpful and correct.
it's annoying. i find myself reading it by default before i remember it's ai and it annoys me everytime. also sometimes ill tell someone about something and they'll only read the ai part and just. not understand. it's so frustrating.
Using firefox (and other browsers), you can set up ublacklist with this blocklist to get rid of this and a ton of other ai slop SEO garbage from your searches!
I feel like this should be the minimum bar for fiction narratives to clear. If the machinations of your plot don't completely confuse Google's shitty AI then your plot is boring and entirely too shallow.
I'll search for something like "season 2 X release data" and regardless of if the TV show's season 2 is announced and has a release date Google will grab literally any date off the page and report it as the officially announced release date.
Unrelated but also related, the Hitman 2 levels were too big for their own good. Colombia and India have 3 targets located in very separated points on the map. Hitman 1 France and Italy are still the gold standard for me.
I don't think I've used Google search in earnest for years now. html.duckduckgo.com is one of the only search engines I use besides the meta ones like searxng/whoogle/librey.
Yeah, Colombia is one of the absolute worst maps, because it's several fortresses all sort of stacked together and stretched out into a very long map where it's a pain to get anywhere. I think Bangkok takes it though, with how its main fortress wing is tiny, densely packed with real NPCs, and has all of two crowded chokepoint entrances to the upper levels - it's basically Paris shrunk down to a single staircase and drain pipe with a quarter of the map's population loitering around both.
Mumbai's a bit annoying, but it's ridiculously porous once you know it and even though it has three distinct fortresses only the Crow's hideout is really annoying, and even that not as bad as the underground in Colombia. The super enforcers wandering around the center of the map are annoying and didn't need to be there, especially not in Freelancer.
Hitman 1 France and Italy are still the gold standard for me.
Honestly it's most of the Hitman 3 maps for me. Disregarding the very last level they're all pretty good; Dartmoor's the weakest since it's basically just "what if Paris was one big, layered fortress and it was all sickeningly British" but even it's not too bad, and Mendoza has to take the top spot imo. Chongqing sits next to Miami and probably edges it out for second place, and Berlin and Dubai are both really solid too once you learn them.
I've played way too much Hitman Freelancer and I got most of the maps to 20 either when I played for the first time on gamepass or when I replayed a pirated copy using peacock, so I've had lots of time to think about every map in way too much detail. There's just something so satisfying about learning the maps and then grabbing the tools to go about them in a specific way, it's like how the Shadowrun TTRPG plays, especially when you're having to do this on the fly with no retries in Freelancer.
I was like "Silent Assassin? I barely remember that game, it's so old" before remembering the numbers reset.
I'd play those games more if they didn't take up 200 gb
sorry, but the inscrutable machine oracle said it so it's just the truth now
"we invented a virtual dumbass and plan to put it in everything"
Paraphrasing a meme I saw idk
