Don’t be alarmed, but Nintendo’s latest gadget is a clock: Alarmo. You shouldn’t be surprised – at the dawn of home gaming, Nintendo’s Game & Watch devices doubled as desk clocks. The tiny snag: rather than helping you track time, you ended up wasting it as the relentless attract mode tempted you to have yet another go at beating your high score.

Alarmo is different. There is no game. There is only clock. And this clock is different, because it watches you while you sleep. Not in a creepy way. In a “you WILL get up when I say so” manner. The second the requisite moment arrives, Alarmo blasts you with sounds and scenes from games like Super Mario Odyssey and Splatoon 3. 

The longer you dawdle – or if you have the audacity to sneak back to bed – the more intense Alarmo gets. Until it jumps on your head like an angry Mario. Or not. Because it’s an alarm clock. You can’t even whack the cartoonish snooze button to transform Alarmo into a turtle shell that bounces around your bedroom. Tsk.

You might respond with a – frankly trivial – detail that what I’m suggesting is impossible. Or at least too expensive for a novelty alarm clock (that nonetheless costs $99). But, hey, Nintendo’s meant to be the innovator. Yet its clock doesn’t even have a round display to match its round shell. Again: tsk.

The company had better set its Alarmo extra early, is all I’m saying. Only then will its people have the time to raise Nintendo’s clock game, before rivals blaze past with cutting-edge gaming timepieces of their own. 

Timepieces like these:

Mineclock

Not an ugly cube with a cheap digital clock glued to it. This effort for real Minecraft fans isn’t a clock at all. It’s instructions on how to punch a tree to get sticks you fashion into a pickaxe used to mine materials to make your own clock. Which, admittedly, won’t get you up on time. OK, maybe don’t go for this one after all.

Grand Theft Autoclock

Forget about receiving a clock. This GTA bad boy tells you where to steal someone else’s. Bonus points for bundling someone out of their car in an unlikely fashion and joyriding to your goal. Although that might mean you’ll end up using the clock to count down hours in jail. Hmm. This design lark is harder than I thought.

Clocktris

OK, not giving you a clock in the box is wrong. So how about dozens of clocks? Which you have to piece together in order to silence a wake-up tune that’s so annoying it makes you want to embed a sharpened ‘L’ piece in the composer’s cranium? And once it’s pieced together, it would disappear, like in Tetris! Hang on. That could get spendy.

Resiclock Evil

Right, then. A clock that stays put. And… that rethinks the traditional alarm clock by combining it with the constant, gnawing fear of flesh-eating monsters! The Resident Evil clock would guarantee you’d never oversleep again. Because you’d get no sleep at all, due to it spending the night making wall-scraping noises and threatening to eat your brains. No? Suit yourself.

Street Fighter II: Turbo Clock Edition

Just literally punches you in the face while screaming “Hadouken!” until you get out of bed. Subtle? No. Effective? Maybe. Although at this point, you’d likely resolve to never buy a video-game-themed clock again. Unless you found a Braid one to rewind time to before the point you were traumatised by all these clocks, while fondly remembering the hour when you were happy to just watch Nintendo characters muck about on a not-round screen.