I've been using Wake-Up Club every time I've needed to wake up for anything since I got my Vita, which feels like two years ago and I'm not going to check to see if that's possible. It feels like it should have more clock themes than it seems to have, but I'm okay sticking with my Journey one. The best thing about it is that the alarm sound is actually not annoying after two years. I use the rushing water sound, which is more like white noise than an alarm and not like any other alarm or ringtone I've grown to hate over time.

The social aspect of Wake-Up Club is weird. I have no idea who these people are ever, or where they are, if they're waking up at similar times to me. They can easily be avoided by setting the alarm to three minutes past the hour, but then why use Wake-Up club at all? The strangest thing to me is the process of waking up as a group with a leaderboard. When the alarm goes off, your avatar flies around the screen and you have to tap the screen until you're awake enough to hit it. Then, you pass on to the screen for your club of the day, where you can see who is awake and who isn't. Sometimes, there are people who haven't hit the alarm and you can tap their avatar to send them a sound to get them to wake up. The AI members of the club require three taps each to wake up. Once everyone's awake, there's a leaderboard that shows who woke up fastest.

Even when I arrive at the club members screen with everyone seemingly awake, I'm always first on the leaderboard, so I don't know what kind of timer it's using, if any. I think if everyone isn't awake after five minutes, the club fails. I've only had this happen when I've woken up before the alarm and come back to bed too late. I'm not going to wait five minutes for other people to wake up or not.

Overall, it's probably the best alarm I've used (mostly because I don't hate the alarm sound) and I'm going to keep using it. Also, I want the trophies.

Over on 3DS, I've been using a DSiWare thing called Sleep Clock, which records your sleep time and purports to analyse your sleeping patterns, telling you when you should sleep and for how long. By "records your sleep", it actually means "you tell it when you go to sleep and wake up" and by "analyse", it means "it'll tell you when you slept and for how long".

I've been using it for just under a month and, although it wasn't exactly what I thought it might be (the Dr. Kawashima of sleeping), it's enough of what I wanted for me to get some use out of it. You tell it when you're going to sleep, close the DS, go to sleep, wake up, open the DS and tell it you're awake. You can then tell it whether you feel 'Great', 'Okay' or 'Bad', which I take as meaning 'Enough Sleep', 'Could Use More' and 'Need Sleep Now!' It has alarms, but I'd rather stick with Wake-Up Club for that, so I haven't been using them. They're functional, at least.

Sleep Clock records the time you sleep each day, for the day you wake up, meaning if you sleep for eight hours starting at 10pm on Saturday, the eight hours of sleep count for Sunday. That led to some weird situations where it looks like I only got four or five hours sleep for that day, when I really got more during the 24-hour period. There are immediate graphs showing the hours you slept, as well as the average sleep time. My average for the last week was 9:04! I always thought I slept for 10-12 hours a day, but this thing's proven me wrong.

After three nights of recorded sleep, you get access to records for how many times you fell asleep at each hour, how many times you slept for each hour length and how many times you woke up at each hour. You can also filter these by the Good, Okay, Bad ratings, allowing you to find out how long you need to sleep to feel good (as long as possible) or when you feel worst waking up (early). However, I find the graphs kind of confusing or useless at this point and I can't really use them to gather much about my erratic sleeping patterns. I sleep when I like and wake up when I have to.

It's a nice piece of software for what I use it for and easier than keeping an Excel spreadsheet or something of my sleep times. I'll keep using it, probably, as long as it makes sense to keep a 3DS next to my bed, and hopefully the graphs will get more useful as the information mounts. For any deeper analysis, I recommend you see a specialist.

Sweet dreams!