New download link worked for me. I played through until I got the dead end signpost in the rapids.
I like the new dungeon, though the new item order confused me a little. I can't complain about lacking the sword, since my hack and Jeville's both withhold it for varying amounts of time. Replacing the Tail Cave boss was a sensible decision, considering the difficulty of the original and the new one. The apparently new coloration for the boss was a creepy-looking improvement over the last. The Flippers were an odd surprise.
One thing that needs to be done is to remove the Like-Like on map 31 of the overworld. It is placed directly in the player's way, the player has no means of recovering the shield from the Like-Like if the Like-Like should rush up and take it. Going back to town is something of a hassle, which I mostly avoided by saving and quitting in the nearby telephone house so I could reload nearby, before trying to get past the Like-Like. I think I lost the shield three times out of four tries.
For a moment I thought it was a game-breaking mistake, since I couldn't go to the castle to get a new shield. Then I remembered that in the normal game, that shop is in town. I've been testing my own hack so long I forgot the shopkeeper isn't at the castle.
I like the textual changes. Link's Awakening has always had some kooky and surreal dialogue, I exaggerated the effect in my own hack, and I like the new kookiness your changes introduce.
It's a pity it's still short. This has been here a really long time and it should be entirely possible to finish it, and do so rather quickly. I strongly encourage you to make a time investment in finishing the mod. I finished mine in two weeks, though it took a little while afterwards to sort out some mistakes. You should be able to churn out a new dungeon fairly quickly.
One thing I don't understand is how you managed to reorganize the first dungeon. The vanilla version's rooms are all shaped like a Moldorm, with a couple empty rooms that make up its eyes. I didn't know you could change that shape. I know you can change the appearance of the mini-map, but not the actual layout of the dungeon. All I knew I could do is reroute the place, changing the doors and the contents of a room. How did you restructure it?
Trying both my hack and Jeville's would probably give you an excellent sense of what you would want in your hack, and what would work. I took a lot of inspiration from Jeville's hack (although much of it was based on things I didn't like about Jeville's hack).
I've noticed a distinct stylistic difference between our respective hacks so far. Jeville has mostly preserved the basic structure of the dungeons while introducing a group of narrowly beatable, highly challenging puzzles, in between otherwise normal rooms. There are little bottlenecks where the player will get stuck for extended periods of time before figuring out how to move on. The place in Bottle Grotto where you need to get a Piece of Power to run against the current of one of those vortex enemies was an excellent example. Only after beating it twice or thrice was I able to do it without save states and not die from the falling damage (falling does half a heart of damage per fall, and with 5 hearts max and a potion to boot, you fall too often to survive). My hack reroutes the dungeons a little more than Jeville's, but also fails to reconstruct them as ULAH does. Like Jeville, I put in puzzles that operate on weird quirks of the game engine, which might be too obscure for the player, and I tend to throw in more of the nastiest enemies. My rooms tend to be very dense, and so they usually have straight walls, which might feel monotonous (I don't know), to maximize the amount of stuff I can cram in. There's also the recoloring thing. I would like to see another recoloring of the game, just to see how somebody else would design it. I don't think the original coloration was done very well. Contrast the colors of LADX with those of Oracle of Seasons, or even Oracle of Ages.
ULAH so far has done a lot to change the dialogue and feel of the early game. The puzzles do some things I haven't seen before--rooms 3 and 16 of Tail Cave are the two examples I would cite--which is very welcome. It also avoids the sudden difficulty spikes in Hard Awakening, nor is the overall level of difficulty really outrageous, like the Face Shrine in New Awakening. The rooms of ULAH's Tail Cave are of similar difficulty, and since none of them is an absolute nightmare, the dungeon plays well. Some previous posters seem to have been frustrated by the new item order, but if you resolve that and design the following dungeons the way you designed Tail Cave--but maybe without moving back and forth from the overworld--your hack would be very unlikely to cause great frustration when finished, and frustrating puzzles are probably the greatest weakness of hacks in general (an early version of my hack had FIVE minibosses in the same room in the Face Shrine!). The designer simply doesn't have the same perspective as the player, and so he or she is likely to design puzzles that players simply do not get.
Please keep up the good work. I've been thinking that in the future we might work together to create a merged hack that combines the best aspects of each one.
