It's certainly the best console beat em up in my opinion. The arcade beat em ups were also great, but the Streets of Rage series brought all the arcade fun to the home. The genre overall is all very similar and cliched really, so its a very subjective evaluation.

i agree with onyx..Streets of Rage 2 is great but the ninja turtles games were better as well as castle crashers, double dragon, i liked battletoads better as well, that michael jackson arcade game (nah just kidding!)

Streets of Rage 2 is my favorite of the 3 in the series. Though I have to agree with people that mention Guardian heroes. That game was just a blast to play. I wish I had owned it, only rented it back then.

I remember the Co-Op back in the day when that game first came out, all of us would just play endlessly after school.

It was our LBP, Fable2, Fallout, GoW2 etc..

It is one of thee best BEU's ever, the music use to sit in our heads for days.

The only rough spot in SOR2 is that you can't run--something they remedied (while breaking lots of other things) in SOR3.

My fav beat 'em ups:

1. Streets of Rage 2 (Sega)
2. Final Fight CD (Sega/Capcom: I just can't get enough of the music which puts it above the arcade rev for me, even with the dialed-down graphics)
3. Bare Knuckle 3 (Sega: much better than SOR3 but not quite as magical as 2)
4. Battle Circuit (Capcom: didn't even come to the USA but Europe got it and it's on GameTap)
5. Sengoku 3 (SNK/Noise Factory: huge surprise for me and 3-4 other people that played it)
6. Alien vs. Predator (Capcom: is there a character in a beat 'em up more fun to play as than Linn Kurosawa? I don't think so...)

7. River City Ransom (Technos: better than any of the Double Dragon titles)

Honorable mention: God Hand

Guardian Heroes, Turtles, etc. were good--great, even--but I always though of those as second-tier titles in the genre (you could cheese your way through GH, unfortunately, and TMNT was awesome when it was new, but without three people to play with, the fun drops off dramatically).

I luuuuurve Turtles In Time. What an awesome game. Did anyone ever play Cyberbots? It was pretty sweet, as I recall.

I've barely touched any of the SoR games, though. Perhaps I should give them a proper try sometime...