this is the next revolution that nintendo is leading.. expect sony and microsoft to follow in two years time. soo all developers will have this in their games

Wouldn't this be a video system in effect?  People would watch the game do it, and then they would know what to do in the future.

@topic in general, I'm not sure how I feel about this yet.  Since it's optional, I really don't have a strong reaction either way.

I concede that I did, but I don't think it's by as much as you'd think at first blush. I think it'd be helpful to think of this from a slightly different perspective.

Let me use a completely unrealistic analogy here: suppose I take up a new hobby, in this case cooking, purely for my own enjoyment (we do exist y'know!). I start out learning some basic knife skills, figure out how to grill things, learn about different settings on the oven, but I'm completely stumped when it comes to figuring out how to season my basic dish. No worries, cooking now has an "auto-cook" feature in which I can skip certain steps of my hobby and have my robo-maid or whatnot do some things for me. I never learned how to do seasonings, but I'm still kind of enjoying what I do know. Except shortly afterwards, I not only have to figure out how much oregano to add to my chicken, I also have to figure out the trick to broiling. Well, I know I can't do the former, and it's tempting to have someone do the latter for me, so I can just keep practicing what (little) I know, so...back to auto-cooking!

And I keep doing this as time goes on, because it's just so tempting and easy to have someone do the hard stuff for me, which lets me do the parts I actually enjoy. But over time I'm doing less and less of my own cooking, because I never really learned how to do the basics, let alone the more advanced stuff, so when it comes time to do souffles and the like I'm more watching than participating. And I realize that the only things I'm doing for myself are the very, very basics; more importantly, I realize that I'm not doing all that much of my own hobby anymore except watching, which is about as fun as it sounds...at that point, I'd go and find a new hobby. And while I did bring this on myself by voluntarily taking the easy way out time and again, it was so very tempting: I was just trying to skip the hard stuff so I can go straight to the fun stuff! Except that by skipping out on the hard stuff early on, I denied myself the wealth of even more fun stuff that I could do later...

It's a vicious cycle, one which I have zero trouble imagining. That's why I still think that the better answer would be to have a teacher gradually introduce me to the necessary skills/challenges, until I'm ready to try things on my own. It's harder, it's trickier to pull off, but in the end it's much more rewarding. And I'm talking about those things from the developer's side, not the consumer's.

Almost certainly so. For starters, I doubt this feature will guide you to any secret areas or bonuses: it's likely just the bare bones approach. I do have to note the irony of rewarding the player who's already proven that he or she can take the harder road and emerge victorious, but it's not like that situation's particularly new or unique to Nintendo (or even unwelcome, in my opinion).

 Actually, I quite disagree. Warps were never simply handed to you: you had to be clever/creative/skilled enough to find where the developers buried them. The cloud and the P-Wings are also different: not only were they finite (you could get, what, five clouds in the entire game?) but they each carried a risk themselves: get hit when using a P-Wing and you lost that power, die in the next stage after using the cloud and you had to beat the level you tried to skip.

By contrast, this feature does not seem to have any limits in how often you can use it, and the risks seem almost non-existent (assuming your co-op partners don't kill your AI-controlled character; I don't see them instituting this in a way that gets your guy killed, as that defeats the entire purpose).

There are similarities, but they're skin-deep.

I haven't died in a Zelda game since A Link to the Past.  OoT is just as easy as TP.

Not really: it has the added benefit of being a video system as well, but where the video can only show you what to do (and then leave the actual execution to you) this service does it for you. I'd be okay if it was just a video service, and I'm sure plenty of folks will employ it as such. I'm just worried that for too many people, the urge to give in to laziness will overcome any desire for improving one's skills (especially when said skills are pretty worthless outside of gaming). I think the analogy I scribbled up in my last post sums up my thought process here.

I wish they had this back in the days of Battle Toads and Snake Rattle 'N Roll!

Pretty sad that they need this for a MARIO game of all things... New Super Mario Bros. on the DS was a joke in terms of overall difficulty, with the exception of getting some of the gold coins, but those aren't necessary to complete the game. Hopefully the silver lining to this is that the level design and difficulty level has been ramped up considerably for NSMB Wii.

Ahh, yes. I can't any negative to this either, but hey, it's Nintendo who announcd this, so there are of course people going 'OMFG NOEZ NINTENDO IS FOR TEH CASUALZ, WII IS D00MED!!1'... All the haters crawl up out of their dark, muddy HD-holes to fling mud at the colorful realm that is Wii and Nintendo in general.

Like over 9,000 people before me said here, it's optional. So, erm, yeah. Why not have it. You don't HAVE to use it, and it's great for people who don't spend hours everyday playing videogames.

And I fully expect both Microsoft and Sony to copy this. That's a given. The question is: how long before they do so? If I were them, I'd do it soon. Get it over with. Everyone knows they'll do it eventually, anyway.