Can confirm, dead as can be. I'd be up for a Discord though, if you wanna make one.

Hi MexicanoPB, I know exactly what you mean. Skipping the Gizmoduck cutscene will sometimes softlock the game for me on PC. The same happened to me many times when trying to skip the Himalaya boss cutscene after defeating it.

Unfortunately I don't have a fix. In my case, it just seems to happen at random, so in my attempts I will go for it and hope it doesn't freeze (you will notice that for the Himalaya boss I actually don't skip the cutscene as the time save is not worth the risk).

If anyone does know how to fix these issues I'm interested as well! :)

Thanks CoKami, it's nice to see some activity here.

The checkpoints still work differently than in Extreme mode. In particular, the Transylvania death warp does not work in any mode other than Extreme, sadly.

Hi garadas. The major speed difference between Extreme mode and the easier modes is that checkpoints work differently, which can be exploited for some death warps which aren't possible otherwise. The main time save comes from a death warp in Transylvania which skips the second rail section and some backtracking, saving about a whole minute of gameplay. In Glitchless you can also death warp in the Moon to avoid backtracking after collecting the three Gizmoduck pieces.

There are also minor time saves due to faster boss cycles, but I think those are pretty much compensated by the invincibility coins that you pick up in Easy mode. For instance, the Moon IL (with Moon Skip) is actually faster to perform in Easy mode for this reason.

As for your second question, I would definitely suggest starting with Easy mode, and only switching to Extreme when you feel confident in your strats, movement skills and health management. Most sections actually use the exact same movement for both difficulties; off the top of my head, the only difference I can think of is one boulder cycle in Vesuvius (boulders move faster in Extreme mode). There are probably more, but they are in all cases very minor, at least in my opinion.

Hope that answers your questions, and good luck on the runs!

I'm pretty sure I learned it from this video:

I know other people use different setups, but I'm not aware of tutorials other than this one. If you have additional questions, feel free to ask and I can try to answer, but I think the video is pretty exhaustive.

@Max_gentleman: I play on PC and it should definitely work, though it might be trickier depending on hardware specifications.