In this paper we give a recursive fixpoint characterization of the winning regions in Rabin and Streett games. We use this characterization in two ways. First, we introduce direct Rabin and Streett ranking that are a sound and complete way to characterize the winning sets in the respective games. By computing directly and explicitly the ranking we can solve such games in time and space for Rabin and for Streett where is the number of states, the number of transitions, and the number of pairs in the winning condition. Second, by keeping intermediate values during the fixpoint evaluation, we can solve such games symbolically in time and space . These results improve on the current bounds of O(mn^{2k}k!)O(m(nk^2k!)^k)$ in the case of reduction to parity games.