I'm not sure what this screen shot actually shows. IIRC, the explosions in Robombs are a set of billboarded quads each showing an animated explosion by fiddling around with the uv-coordinates (the texture contains multiple states of the explosion in a sprite sheet). Your texture is just some fire texture...in the best case, you would see some fire textured quads.
Anyway, i've no idea what your screen shot shows, so....