I don't flinch. This is the Xenia experience: you stop trusting the UI. You trust the feel .

The classic Sonic loads first. He lands on the checkerboard dirt, but the soil is a mosaic of missing textures—purple and black squares bleeding into the grass. The water doesn't reflect; it shows a frozen image of the skybox from three seconds ago.

I hold forward anyway. The emulator corrects. Sonic slams back onto the half-pipe like nothing happened.

But then the music kicks. The funky bassline of the Generations remix cuts through the emulation lag. The rings spin in perfect 60fps, even though the background clouds are stuttering like a broken GIF.