Valve released the details of their Left 4 Dead 2 pre-order offer earlier today.  Their offer, to those of you willing to fork over your hard earned cash in advance:  early demo access (woo…), a baseball bat with an American flag skin (yay…), and a 10% discount on the purchase price (that’s better).

These offers will be offered through Steam or through participating retailers starting immediately.  Early demo access begins October 27 (tentatively) and the game launches on the PC and Xbox 360 on November 17th.

With a wallet-draining mess of sequels coming out between now and the end of the year, you could say that 2009 is set to be yet another “year of the sequel.”  Now, we know that all of these top-tier games are probably going to be great—and we’d love to have them all.  But since many of our wallets are looking a bit thin these days, buying them all is going to be a problem (unless that plan to win the lottery finally works out).  So, if you could afford to buy only ONE of these games, which one would it be?

Halo 3: ODST

Forza Motorsport 3

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Left 4 Dead 2

Assassin’s Creed 2

For those of you still on the fence about picking up Left 4 Dead 2 when it releases this November—maybe because of fears of the “more-of-the-same” variety—I’d like you to meet the newest member of the Special Infected family, “The Jockey.”  After already seeing the other two Special Infected characters announced earlier in the year (The Charger and The Spitter), this most recently revealed little fella just wants to be close to you.  More specifically, he wants to ride on your back and steer you all over the place—maybe off a ledge or in to a horde of hungry Infected anxious for your tender brain.  With the addition of a third Special Infected character, and with the 20-plus brand new items and melee weapons already announced, L4D2 should have enough new content to keep your thumbs busy for awhile.