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PAX Prime 2012: Wake-up Club | PSNStores

PAX Prime 2012: Wake-up Club

Posted by on September 6th, 2012 | 5 Comments | Tags: ,

I am totally serious when I say that Wake-up Club is at the top of my Vita “Most Wanted List”. I don’t know if it is the trophies or the crazy idea of setting up group alarms but Wake-up Club is in fact as crazy as it sounds.

The first thing we did at PAX after checking out Guacamelee was to head over to the Sony booth. Like with most conventions I assumed that I would be spending a lot of time there so I wanted to get a quick head count of what PlayStation had to show off. Sure Battle Royale and Last of Us were there, but I was immediately attracted over to the PS Vita Apps kiosk. I figured this had to be the time for Sony to show off Wake-up Club. I was correct.

[gallery_imgs dir=”http://media.psnstores.com/vita/wakeup/” num=”11″]

Sure it looks like a simple alarm application, but Wake-up Club has some rather unique features. First and foremost is the “Wake-up Club Alarm”. Unlike an alarm that you would set on your cellphone the WUC Alarm is connected to others around you. It uses the PS Vita to connect and find others with similar alarms so that you all wake-up together. If you need some extra motivation to get up first, there are trophies. Yup you will want to be the first to wake-up so you can snag some sick rewards.

If you don’t want to be part of the Wake-up club you can set a normal alarm, but why would you ever want to do that? From my scientific testing of the app, after setting an alarm you can completely leave the program and start doing other things. When the time comes a notification will pop up asking that you launch the Wake-up Club app. This was probably my biggest worry and I was glad to see that you don’t need to keep the app open for the alarms to work.

There are also numerous different settings you can tweak. Different clock faces (one even has a fake Timex Indiglo effect), all sorts of voices to scream at you in the morning (in English or Japanese) and even some animal noises. So if you ever wanted to voluntarily wake up to the sounds of raccoons… this is your app. There is also a timer included if you need to cook some pot roast or something. There is even this really in-depth stats page listings all sorts of wake-up stats like average time it took to wake-up, number of times you woke-up, etc.

We still have no clue when it is coming out. I asked every Sony rep I saw and none could provide an answer. But we will keep pushing and hopefully it will be released soon.