well, we would've used normal mapping, but it's not the style we're going for, and not only that we're aiming for a bigger audience with lower pc's than most of us have, for instance i could run all these great shaders at home, but not all casual gamers will be able to, so we want it to look good, but run at at least 30 fps on a system that's a few years old, considering that alot of casual gamers won't have great new video cards or processors, but at the same time, it still looks good for those gamers.

The explosions are actually models with 2 sets of normals, one flipped inward and on flipped to the outside.

Thanks for the input Metal_Man