It looks to me like it's going to be solely a 'blast your friends to pieces' type of game, with no storyline nor single person play.  That is, you can play as a single person and "Hone your skills against a slew of enemies in single-player training modes" but as far as I can tell there's no real metroid plot.  Does anyone have any more information on this? 

cheers,

-avatar!

That's not what I just read... Apparently, it has a single-player game that's just a bit shorter than Metroid Prime (which took me 18 hours to complete).

The most recent NP has a bunch of info on the 1P mode.  Highlights are as follows:

-Game contains energy tanks, missile upgrades, universal ammo, variety of beam weapons, missilies, bombs
-Morph ball and bomb jump abilities
-First Metroid game to involve travel to multiple locations
-Scan visor
-Takes place between MP1 and MP2

That said, there's still no indication that the bulk of the gameplay is anything other than combat and some platforming.  No word of puzzles or anything like that.  Due mostly to the awkward controls, I'll probably be skipping this one.

Yeah, it's hard to say. Since all weapons and special abilities are intact at the beginning of gameplay, I'm not sure how the game is going to be structured. It's the first for a Metroid game.

You don't start with all of the weapons.  You get a new weapon each time you beat one of the rival hunters (a la Mega Man).

^

Huh... that's not what I read at IGN...

Hmmm, so no one knows for sure
Well, if it does have a well developed storyline, I might get it.  I'm curious, has anyone played it, and if so how are the controls?  I know Nintendo released a demo of the game, but that was ages ago.  I wouldn't be surprised if it's been vastly changed.

cheers,

-avatar!

I don't know about IGN, but the thing I mentioned was straight out of an NP interview with the dev team.

The last time I played it was last May.  At that point, it had evolved from the demo, but it still wasn't easy to control.