Nintendo recently released something weird!  It’s a fancy alarm clock called the Alarmo!  But you can’t get it just anywhere.  It’s only available either at the Nintendo store in New York City, or if you have a My Nintendo account and order it on that website.  But one thing they won’t tell you in the ads for it is how much it costs.  And the price is 100 bucks!  That’s insane!  But you know what?  I caved in and bought one anyway.  Why?  Well one, I was in the market for a new alarm clock.  Yeah I’m old fashioned and still use one of those instead of my phone.  And two, lots of other people spend big money on those fancy Apple watches, so I figured I’d splurge and give this one a try.  So is the Alarmo worth 100 bucks?  You’ll just have to read on to find out!

So here’s a bigger picture of the front of the box.  One thing you should know right away is that while it does come with a power cord, it doesn’t come with the plug.  You can probably just use one of your phone charger plugs for this, but I hate it when electronics do this kind of thing.  Pretty soon we’re going to run out of those.  Also if you unplug it, there’s no battery backup to keep it going, so if the power goes out, you might oversleep.

I’ll post the sides of the box, too, since they do a pretty good job of explaining what the Alarmo is SUPPOSED to do.  First of all, you can have the screen have one of five characters and sounds from five Nintendo Switch games.  You’ve got Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, Pikmin 4, and Ring Fit Adventures. The Alarmo can connect to the Internet and your Nintendo account and supposedly later on you can download other alarms from games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.  But as of this writing, you can’t download those yet.   I’ll go into what each of these games do on the Alarmo later on in this article, as it’s one of the few things that I could get to work right.

The other side of the box explains the other big feature of the Alarmo.  It uses a motion sensor to detect your movements.  Don’t worry, it doesn’t have a camera so someone can watch you sleep.  It just detects motion.  Supposedly the alarm will make noises and intensify the music when you move around but not wake up.  And when you get out of bed, it’ll sense that and stop the alarm.  But if you get back in bed within that hour, it’s supposed to activate a snooze alarm.  I’ll explain how well this worked for me later on.  Also, if you sleep with someone or have pets, this part of the alarm clock may not work right for you.  So there’s a big limitation right there.

The back of the box shows the best requirements for making the motion sensor work.  Like where you have to place the alarm, how high it must be compared to your bed, etc.  So yeah, even more limitations.

Anyway, let’s go over what each of the games do on this alarm.  Each game does certain things different.  Those things are what’s shown on the screen, the alarms you can pick from, sleepy sounds before bed, and the hourly chime.

Super Mario Odyssey

So on the screen it’ll show the font from that game and Mario will walk around and sometimes jump.  At night he’ll just lay down.  The alarms and sounds are music from the game, so you can wake up to things like Pauline singing a lick from Jump Up! Superstar!  You can also turn on sleepy sounds that’ll play right before you go to bed (you have to set your bedtime).  Mario’s is just a slow sounding song that sounds like a new age musician fell asleep on their keyboard.  You can also have an hourly chime that plays.  But don’t worry, you can always turn it off and it won’t go off while you’re sleeping either.  Mario’s hourly chime is just him hitting a coin block the same number of times as the hour.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Here Link just walks around the screen and sometimes jumps and glides down.  One of the alarms you can play here from the beginning of the game, where Link is in his healing sleep chamber and Zelda wakes him up telepathically by saying, “Wake up!  Open your eyes, Link!”  So if you want to be woken up by the sound of Princess Zelda’s voice, here you go, you weirdo (just joking).  The sleepy sounds is just campfire noises and animal sounds, and some piano licks here and there.  Link sits by a campfire on the screen at night, too.  The hourly chime is the shrines statues that fill your hearts, and it’ll fill the same number of hearts as the hour.

Splatoon 3

The Squid Kid Girl and her pet salmon thing walk around and sometimes she’ll turn into a squid and splash around.  The alarms are songs and noises from the game.  The sleepy sounds are just a slow song from the game, and on screen she’ll just sit down.  The hourly chime has her shooting a block the same number of times as the hour.

Pikmin 4

I’m a little surprised they picked this game for the alarm, because I didn’t think it was as popular.  I’m not a big Pikmin fan anyway.  The screen just has Olimar and three Pikmin walking around.  The alarms are songs from the game, but one has a cute little fanfare that’s fun to wake up to.  Sleepy sounds are a relaxing song from the game, and it shows the dog (Oatchi is his name I believe) sleeping.  I’ve never played Pikmin 4, but I think the dog is a cute idea, even if he looks a little weird.  The hourly chime has Olimar plucking the same number of Pikmin out of the ground as the hour.

Ring Fit Adventures

I’m also pretty surprised that this one’s on there.  But I also hear it sold rather well, and good sleep is important to fitness, too.  And I’d have to say that Ring Fit Adventures is probably the best fitness game I’ve ever played.  I actually felt like I got somewhat of a workout by playing it, and the main story mode houses a very competent RPG, with skill trees and everything!  Anyway, the screen here shows the Ring Fit girl walking around and sometimes shooting fire out of the ring.  Alarms are songs from the game with the ring talking.  Sleepy sounds are a cool down song, and at night the Ring Fit Girl gets on the ground and stretches.  Hourly chime has her charging up the ring the same number of times as the hour.

Anyway, later on you’re supposed to be able to download alarms from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.  I’m looking forward to the Animal Crossing one since that’s my number two favorite game of all time.  But I think they should have more.  How about Kirby or WarioWare alarms? Wake up with a start with Metroid!   Or retro Nintendo games?  I know it would be too much to ask for third party alarms, but I’d love to see ones based on Pac-Man or Mega Man.  What alarms would you like to see for the Alarmo?  Let me know in the comments section.

OK with that out of the way, I’ll talk about how the Alarmo works and my opinions of it.  First of all, I’m glad to say that for the most part, it was easy to set up. You use the light up knob on top to spin and make selections by pressing it.  There are also buttons for going back in the menus and one for reading notifications.  My only problem with setup was when I had to set my time zone.  When I was in school, we just learned Pacific Time, Mountain Time, Central Time, etc.  So what’s all this GMT business?  Why do I have to set up a time zone for an alarm clock anyway?

But a bigger problem I had was the motion features never worked for me, no matter how much I played with it in setup.  The alarm would go off for a minute and I would try and move around, and it would stop after a few minutes and never come back on.  Very unreliable, and that’s not what you want in an alarm clock.  Luckily you can put it in “Button Mode” where you just turn off the alarm with the button.  And that’s what I had to do here.  You can also view your sleep records, but with how bad the motion feature worked here, I didn’t trust the results of the records either.

I think my biggest problem, though, is how they handle brightness.  Supposedly you can adjust it for the modes, but no matter what, it’ll automatically adjust to the lights in the room.  So at night you can barely see it.  I imagine that for most people, this wouldn’t be a problem.  But when I wake up in the middle of the night and want to know what time it is, I like to be able to see my clock pretty well.  And the brightness wouldn’t bother me anyway.  I mean, I spend most of the night with my eyes closed anyway, so I wouldn’t see it.  If I’m paying 100 bucks for an alarm clock, I should be able to adjust the brightness to however I want it!

So yeah, overall I’m pretty dissatisfied with the Alarmo.  I’d almost like to send it back to Nintendo and get a refund, but I’m too curious about the Animal Crossing alarm.  But yeah, definitely not worth 100 bucks.  Simply stated, the Alarmo is A-lame-o!  –Cary

Tags: Misc