"In New Super Mario Bros Wii, if a player is experiencing an area of difficulty, this will allow them to clear troubled areas and take over when they're ready."

This makes me think of World of Goo's 'skip this level' feature. In that game it's limited to three levels, and yet I didn't use it at all.
If Nintendo wants to exagerately help the player but let her decide wheter or not to be helped, it's ok for me.

I'm still really skeptical that this idea is any good at all. Since most games have (or attempt to have) a linear difficulty progression, surely if you can't get past an area of the game because it's too difficult then you won't make it past later sections that should be even harder. Therefore, you pretty much have to be able to skip the rest of the entire game :)

Granted, it's useful if a section has an unexpected difficulty spike, but that's just bad design and should not require this kind of "band-aid" type fix.

I'm really concerned that the ideas of difficulty / challenge in games are slowly being erroded by this all-consuming concept of uber-accessibility, which will just lead to over-easy, lackluster and unrewarding experiences. Is that really a good thing? Seriously, how can we ever consider a "the game plays itself" feature to be a good one?